There you see your mother – getting up early cooking meals all day washing and ironing – and still she has to go out in the backyard and chop wood. GIBBS: Well, George, while I was in my office today I heard a funny sound…and what do you think it was? It was your mother chopping wood. It is a tribute to the timeless quality of the play that despite the intervening years – from the play’s debut until now – not much has changed.ĭR. Even my class of grade ten students were able to see themselves in George and Emily. They are just average citizens, concerned with the weather, town gossip, and their children. He has the power to alert the audience to events in the future and to allow characters to revisit the past, as he does – famously – for Emily in Act Three.

The Stage Manager acts both as a sort of Greek chorus and bit player. Our Town is a fine example of metadrama that is a play which draws attention to the fact that it is a play.

The Stage Manager guides us through the play. Yet the exact opposite is true: everything happens. One might easily argue that nothing happens. The three act structure of the play mirrors the circle of life: birth, love and marriage, death.

“With two ladders, a few pieces of furniture, and a minimum of props, he attempted to “find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.”” “Stripping the stage of fancy artifice, Wilder set himself a formidable challenge,” says Marguiles. For theatre goers attending that first production, Wilder’s play must have seemed wildly modern. In the Foreward of the HarperPerennial edition of the play Donald Marguiles, an American playwright and professor, calls Wilder “the first American playwright.” Marguiles further posits that Wilder paved the way for many of the playwrights who came after, and are perhaps better known: Albee, Williams, Miller.įirst produced for the stage in 1938, Wilder’s play takes place in Grover’s Corner, New Hampshire. (I know, eh?) It’s dog-eared and highlighted and marked up and the words contained within still, after all these years, move me. I probably purchased my copy of the play around then – it’s an Avon paperback which, according to the cover, cost $1.75. If you are a regular visitor to this blog, then you know that Robby and I go way (way) back.

My best guess is that it was because of Robby Benson, who starred in an adaptation of the play which must have aired on television. I was trying to figure out how I would have come into contact with it, as I certainly didn’t read it while in school. I have loved Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, Our Town, since I was fourteen or fifteen.

Our town book thornton wilder