"Our Town... is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life."
Thornton Wilder
When Our Town opened in New York in 1938, the audience was confronted with something the likes of which they had never seen: an actor standing on a bare stage began conversing with the audience, breaking the barrier between reality and the traditional "willing suspension of disbelief" of most plays. In place of the extravagant sets popular at the time, the audience saw two ladders. The actor, who identified himself as the Stage Manager, went on to explain which actors would play which characters. Time jumped back and forth as the audience was told of future deaths of the characters they were seeing. Most revolutionary of all, there was an understanding between the actors and the audience that the play was not real.
The first act of Our Town, titled "Daily Life," introduces the audience to Grovers
Corners, New Hampshire. The two families around whom the play is centered-the Webbs and the Gibbses-are introduced by showing us what one day (May 7, 1901) was like for these two families.
In the second act, "Love and Marriage," the Stage Manager jumps ahead three years to the wedding day of George Gibbs and Emily Webb. To explain what is going on, he first goes back to the day when Emily and George fell in love. This liberty with time reminds us we are watching a social commentary rather than a story with a linear plot. George and Emily's wedding ends the act.
If the play ended here, it would be like a fairy tale: "and they all lived happily ever after." Instead, the Stage Manager takes the audience nine years forward in time. The third act finishes the life cycle; its title, therefore, is "Death." At a new gravesite, the dead solemnly welcome Emily, who has died in childbirth. She learns she can live over again a day in her life, although the others warn her against this. Emily chooses her twelfth birthday, but soon discovers the day holds no joy because she knows what is in store. When George arrives and throws himself on Emily's grave, she feels pity for him and for all the rest of the living--she has learned how little they really understand the wonderful gift that is life itself. |
