Our Town (Criticism)

Criticism

William P. Wiles

Wiles is a teacher with more than twenty years of experience in secondary education. His essay examines why Wilder’s play continues to be so popular.

No scenery. Not even a curtain hides the back wall of the stage. A few chairs; two tables; two stepladders. No props, except for the Stage Manager’s pipe. No breathtaking special effects; no stirring musical score. Just a few recorded sounds and some hymns. Why, then, has Our Town not only endured since 1938, but prospered as America’s most often produced play?

Thornton Wilder shows human beings as they believe in their hearts they live. Life in this play seems simple. Nearly everyone is happy and good-natured. Only one, Simon Stimson the church organist, appears to be truly unhappy, but, other than some gossip, the audience never gets to know him as a developed character.

By setting the play in the not too distant past, Wilder strikes a responsive chord with feelings of nostalgia. The past, the way things used to be, seems better than the present, the way things are. The combination of life as people would like it to be set in a less complicated (and better) time than the present day creates enormous appeal. If Wilder explored the darkness of Simon Stimson’s life, that would detract from the innocence of George and Emily. If Wilder had set the play in the nineteenth century instead of at its end, there would be difficulty relating to the characters. Instead of dealing with the particular aspects of a small New England Town and its inhabitants, Wilder focuses attention on the bigger picture — the universality of events, emotions, and responses.

In the classic film Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart’s character, Ric Blaine, says to Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), “[T]he problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Thornton Wilder would not agree. By using the ordinary, everyday events of people from a town off the beaten path, Wilder argues that it is precisely the problems of the common people that make life interesting and worth examining. The focus of Our Town is two events which are common to every single human who has ever lived, who lives now, and who will live long after the current population has turned to dust: birth and death. A third event, love and marriage, is so much a part of people’s lives that it receives equal billing. Everyone who watches the play can identify with some part of what is going on and can probably name a counterpart from their own real world for each of the characters.

Act One, called “Daily Life,” introduces this concept of the particular representing the universal. The inhabitants of Grover’s Corners go about their routines: delivering milk and newspapers and babies in the early morning hours; preparing breakfast; getting ready for school; feeding chickens; stringing beans with a neighbor; chatting about a dream; worrying about looks; gossiping about the town drunk; walking home from choir practice. Those in the audience are drawn into this world because, even though it is set in the recent past, it is familiar territory; these events are part of the audience’s experiences too. Thus, a bond between actors and audience is established.

Thornton Wilder points out in the preface to a 1957 collection that includes Our Town that “the recurrent words in this play (few have noticed it) are ‘hundreds,“thousands,’ and ‘millions.’” How can people comprehend such vast numbers? Wilder maintains that they do not — “each individual’s assertion to an absolute reality can only be inner, very inner.” The only way to make sense, then, of this “crazy world” is to look at those things that are real and important, those that happen on the inside. The actions on the stage are not important in and of themselves; what becomes important, then, is how the individual responds to them. And, because the actions of the play are part of the overall human experience, the response becomes one of connectedness and not alienation.

In Act Two, “Love and Marriage,” Wilder, through the Stage Manager, manipulates time so that the audience can not only participate in the wedding of George and Emily, but also see how and when this romance began in earnest. “I’m awfully interested in how big things like that begin,” the Stage Manager declares. Throughout this act we are reminded of the vast continuum not only of human existence, but of the residents of Grover’s Corners. In three years since Act One, the sun has “come up over a thousand times.” The mountain has eroded ever so slightly and “millions of gallons of water [have gone] by the mill.” Babies aren’t babies any longer, and some inhabitants have grown older. Other residents have fallen in love. It is against this vast backdrop that Morgan’s drugstore becomes the focal point for the moment when George declares his affection for Emily in the halting shy way that countless others have attempted to express their deepest feelings.

In his descriptions at the beginning of Act Three of those who rest in the cemetery on a hilltop in Grover’s Corners, the Stage Manager comments on the beauty of the setting. He also points out that these people were both silly and noble, Wilder’s reminder that die human race is not an either/or proposition — it contains all possibilities.

At the beginning of the play, the Stage Manager mentioned the death of Mrs. Gibbs, but it was simply a statement of fact. Now, to learn mat Mrs. Gibbs has died and is buried in the cemetery along with Wally Webb and Mrs. Soames and Simon Stimson strikes a responsive chord. These are no longer just names; the audience has met them and the characters they represent have become real. Death becomes less of an abstraction and more a part of the universal experience. Everyone — the characters in the play, the author, the audience, the reader, the critic — is going to die. That is part of what it means to be human, and one of the two events that all humans share no matter what their station, background, or ability.

The dead in the Grover’s Corners cemetery are waiting, says the Stage Manager, for the earth part of them to be burned away and for the “eternal part in them to come out clear.” It is this idea that the dead hardly remember what it was like to be alive that Wilder seeks to emphasize here. It is this movement toward the “eternal” rather than an emptiness or void that Emily joins but is not yet ready to accept. When she realizes that she can return to earth to relive her life, she persists in making it happen, even though the dead and the Stage Manager strongly advise against it.

It is when Emily relives her twelfth birthday (her happiest memory) that she comes to realize that the living don’t appreciate being alive. “They’re sort of shut up in little boxes,” she says. With her knowledge of past, present, and future time, she becomes overwhelmed at the realization that the tiniest moments of everyday life are full of the essence of being alive. “Oh earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

As the Stage Manager draws a black curtain across the scene, the cycle is complete. The play began at daybreak and ends at night. It began with birth and ends with death. It began with the particulars of daily life and ends with eternity.

Source: William P. Wiles, in an essay for Drama for Students, Gale, 1997.

What Do I Read Next?

• Also by Thornton Wilder and included with Our Town in Three Plays by Thornton Wilder are. The Skin of Our Teeth and The Matchmaker. The Skin of Our Teeth focuses on the Antrobus family from Excelsior, New Jersey. Together they endure the Ice Age and the Great Flood, as well as the malicious acts of son Henry, whose name is changed to Cain after the “accidental” death of his brother. This play earned Wilder his third Pulitzer Prize. The Matchmaker had an earlier life as The Merchant ofYonkers: A Farce in Four Acts (1938). The title character of the play is Dolly Levi, a worldly-wise widow who attempts to dissuade an uncharitable merchant from opposing the marriage of his niece to an impoverished artist. In 1964, Michael Stewart and Jerry Herman adapted The Matchmaker as the popular musical Hello, Dolly!
• Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters is a collection of poems that detail thoughts of residents of the fictional town of Spoon River, Illinois, who speak from the grave. Instead of the very brief comments of the dead from Act Three of Our Town, Masters presents free verse epitaphs from the inhabitants of the graveyard on the hill. The Stage Manager himself refers to this work in the opening monologue to Act Two: “It’s like what one of those Middle West poets said: You’ve got to love life to have life, and you’ve got to have life to love life.” This line comes form “Lucinda Matlock,” one of the epitaphs of Spoon River.
• Main Street by Sinclair Lewis presents a completely different portrayal of small town life than does Our Town. A good choice for contrast.
• Shoeless Joe, a novel by W. P. Kinsella that was later made into the film Field of Dreams, and the book Baseball that accompanies the PBS series of the same name by filmmaker Ken Burns, provide some insight into the popularity of the game of baseball before it became a business. Both film projects are worthwhile as well, even though the Baseball series is nine hours long (9 one-hour episodes or “innings”). These works, like Our Town, evoke a more innocent and simpler time in America’s past.