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* '''Stage Manager''' – a narrator, commentator, and guide through Grover's Corners. He joins in the action of the play periodically, as the [[reverend]] at the wedding, the soda shop owner, a local townsmen, etc., and speaks directly to Emily after her death.
* '''Stage Manager''' – a narrator, commentator, and guide through Grover's Corners. He joins in the action of the play periodically, as the [[reverend]] at the wedding, the soda shop owner, a local townsmen, etc., and speaks directly to Emily after her death.
* '''Emma Webb''' – arguably the main character; we follow her from a precocious young girl through her wedding to George Gibbs and her early death.
* '''Emily Webb''' – arguably the main character; we follow her from a precocious young girl through her wedding to George Gibbs and her early death.
* '''George Gibbs''' – arguably the main character; the boy next door, a kind but irresponsible teenager who matures over time and becomes a responsible husband, father and farmer.
* '''George Gibbs''' – arguably the main character; the boy next door, a kind but irresponsible teenager who matures over time and becomes a responsible husband, father and farmer.
* '''Frank Gibbs''' – George's father, the town doctor
* '''Frank Gibbs''' – George's father, the town doctor

Revision as of 20:28, 11 November 2014

For other uses, see Our Town (disambiguation).
Our Town
1938 first edition cover from the Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division
Written byThornton Wilder
CharactersStage Manager
Mrs. Myrtle Webb
Mr. Charles Webb
Emily Webb
Joe Crowell Jr.
Mrs. Julia Gibbs
Dr. Frank F. Gibbs
Simon Stimson
Mrs. Soames
George Gibbs
Howie Newsome
Rebecca Gibbs
Wally Webb
Professor Willard
Woman in the Balcony
Man in the Auditorium
Lady in the Box
Mrs. Louella Soames
Constable Warren
Si Crowell
Three Baseball Players
Sam Craig
Joe Stoddard
Date premieredFebruary 4, 1938
Place premieredHenry Miller's Theatre
New York City, New York
Original languageEnglish
SubjectLife and death in an American small town
GenreDrama
Setting1901 to 1913. Grover's Corners, New Hampshire near Massachusetts.

Our Town is a 1938 three-act play by American playwright Thornton Wilder. Set in the fictional American small town of Grover's Corners, it tells the story of an average town's citizens in the early twentieth century as depicted through their everyday lives. Scenes from the town's history between the years of 1901 and 1913 are performed. The play is performed without a set and the actors mime their actions without the use of props. Throughout Wilder uses metatheatrical devices, such as narration by a stage manager.

Our Town was first performed at McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey on January 22, 1938. It later went on to success on Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It remains popular today and revivals are frequent.

Synopsis

Act I: Daily Life

The Stage Manager [often in story] introduces the audience to the minute town of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, and the people living there as a morning begins in the year 1901. Joe Crowell, one of the characters in the book delivers the paper to Doc Gibbs, Howie Newsome delivers the milk, and the Webb and Gibbs households send their children off to school, on this beautifully simple morning.

Act II: Love and Marriage

Three years pass and George and Emily prepare to wed. The day is filled with stress. Howie Newsome is delivering milk in the pouring rain while Si Crowell, younger brother of Joe, laments how George's baseball talents will be squandered. George pays an awkward visit with his soon-to-be in-laws. Here, the Stage Manager interrupts the scene and takes the audience back a year, to the end of Emily and George's junior year. Emily confronts George about his pride, and over an ice cream soda, they discuss the future and their love for each other. George resolves not to go to college, as he had planned, but to work and eventually take over his uncle's farm. The wedding follows where George, in a fit of nervousness, tells his mother that he is not ready to marry, and Emily tells her father she is not ready to marry either, but they both calm down and accept their proposals happily.

Act III: Death and Dying

The Stage Manager opens the act with a lengthy monologue emphasizing eternity, and introduces us to the cemetery outside of town and the characters who died in the nine years since Act Two: Mrs Gibbs (pneumonia, while traveling), Wally Webb (burst appendix, while camping), Mrs Soames, and Simon Stimson (suicide by hanging), among others. We meet the undertaker, Joe Stoddard, and a young man named Sam Craig who has returned home for his cousin's funeral. We learn that his cousin is Emily, who died giving birth to her and George's second child. The funeral ends and Emily emerges to join the dead. Then Mrs. Gibbs tells her that they must wait and forget the life that came before, but Emily refuses. Despite the warnings of Simon, Mrs. Soames, and Mrs. Gibbs, Emily decides to return to Earth to re-live just one day, her 12th birthday. She finally finds it too painful, and realizes just how much life should be valued, "every, every minute." Poignantly, she asks the Stage Manager whether anyone realizes life while they live it, and is told, "No. The saints and poets, maybe – they do some." She then returns to her grave, beside Mrs. Gibbs, watching impassively as George kneels weeping at her graveside. The Stage Manager concludes the play, and wishes the audience a good night.

Characters

  • Stage Manager – a narrator, commentator, and guide through Grover's Corners. He joins in the action of the play periodically, as the reverend at the wedding, the soda shop owner, a local townsmen, etc., and speaks directly to Emily after her death.
  • Emily Webb – arguably the main character; we follow her from a precocious young girl through her wedding to George Gibbs and her early death.
  • George Gibbs – arguably the main character; the boy next door, a kind but irresponsible teenager who matures over time and becomes a responsible husband, father and farmer.
  • Frank Gibbs – George's father, the town doctor
  • Julia (Hersey) Gibbs – George's mother. She dreams of going to Paris, but doesn't get there. Dies later while visiting her daughter in Ohio. She saved $350 for the trip from the sale of an antique furniture piece, but ultimately willed it to George and Emily.
  • Charles Webb – Emily's father, editor of the Grover's Corners Sentinel
  • Myrtle Webb – Emily's mother

Secondary characters

  • Joe and Si Crowell – local paperboys. Joe's intelligence earns him a full scholarship to MIT where he graduates at the top of his class. His promise will be cut short on the fields of France during World War I, according to the Stage Manager. Both he and his brother Si hold marriage in high disdain.
  • Simon Stimson – the choir director and church organist. We never learn the root cause of his alcoholism and later suicide. He is still bitter and cynical beyond the grave.
  • Howie Newsome – the milkman, a fixture of Grover's Corners.
  • Rebecca Gibbs – George's younger sister. Later elopes with a traveling salesman and settles in Ohio.
  • Wally Webb – Emily's younger brother. Dies of a burst appendix on a Boy Scout camping trip.
  • Professor Willard – a rather long-winded lecturer
  • Woman in Auditorium – concerned with temperance
  • Man in Auditorium – concerned with social justice
  • Another Woman in Auditorium – concerned with culture and beauty
  • Mrs. Louella Soames – a gossipy townswoman and member of the choir
  • Constable Bill Warren – the policeman
  • Three Baseball Players – who mock George at the wedding
  • Joe Stoddard – the undertaker
  • Sam Craig – a nephew of Mrs Gibbs who left town to seek his fortune. He came back after 12 years in Buffalo for Emily's funeral.
  • Dead Man
  • Dead Woman
  • Mr. Carter
  • Farmer McCarty
  • Bessie – Howie Newsome's horse (visible to the characters, but not the audience)

Composition

Wilder wrote the play while in his 30s. In June 1937, he lived in the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, one of the many locations where he worked on the play. During a visit to Zürich in September 1937, it is believed he drafted the entire third act in one day after a long evening walk in the rain with a friend, author Samuel Morris Steward.[1]

Setting

The play is set in the fictional community of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. The narrator gives the coordinates of Grover's Corners as 42°40′ north latitude and 70°37′ west longitude, which is in Massachusetts, about a thousand feet off the coast of Rockport. The author also refers to the town of Concord.

Style

Wilder was dissatisfied with the theatre of his time: "I felt that something had gone wrong....I began to feel that the theatre was not only inadequate, it was evasive."[2] His response was to use a metatheatrical style. Our Town's narrator, the Stage Manager, is completely aware of his relationship with the audience, leaving him free to break the fourth wall and address them directly. According to the script, the play is to be performed with little scenery, no set and minimal props. The characters mime the objects with which they interact. Their surroundings are created only with chairs, tables, staircases, and ladders. For example, the scene in which Emily helps George with his evening homework, conversing through upstairs windows, is performed with the two actors standing atop separate ladders to represent their neighboring houses. Wilder once said: "Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind – not in things, not in 'scenery.' "[3]

Production history

Our Town was first performed at McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey on January 22, 1938. It next opened at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston, Massachusetts on January 25, 1938. Its New York City debut was on February 4, 1938 at Henry Miller's Theatre, and later moved to the Morosco Theatre; this production was produced and directed by Jed Harris.[4] Wilder received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1938 for the work.[5]

In 1946, the Soviet Union prevented a production of Our Town in the Russian sector of occupied Berlin "on the grounds that the drama is too depressing and could inspire a German suicide wave."[6]

Awards

Adaptations

Hal Holbrook as the Stage Manager in the 1977 TV adaptation.

The play has been adapted numerous times:

References

  1. ^ Steward, Samuel; Gertrude Stein; Alice B. Toklas (1977). Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas. Houghton Mifflin. p. 32. ISBN 0-395-25340-3.
  2. ^ Wilder, Thornton. Thornton Wilder, Collected Plays and Writings on Theater. Preface.
  3. ^ Lumley, Frederick (1967). New Trends in 20th Century Drama: A Survey since Ibsen and Shaw. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 333. OCLC 330001.
  4. ^ "Our Town". Internet Broadway Database. Retrieved 2008-07-10.
  5. ^ The Pulitzer Board (1938). "Pulitzer Prize Winners of 1938". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2008-07-10.
  6. ^ "Play 'Our Town' is Banned in Soviet Berlin Sector", Christian Science Monitor, Feb 13, 1946, p. 13.
  7. ^ "Our Town". Playbill.com. Retrieved 2010-12-12.
  8. ^ http://www.americanrepertoryballet.org/ARB/repertory/Our-Town

Further reading

  • Wilder, Thornton (1938). Our Town: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Coward McCann, Inc. pp. 128 pp. OCLC 773139.

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