Plays for Our Times: “Our Town,” by Thornton Wilder
[From Carla’s husband Larry: Written in her final days, this completes the publication of Carla’s essays, each created as she stood “looking with a moral-ethical lens at the intersection of politics, culture, and the American character.”]
The wonderful thing about the classics — be it play or film or book — is that, being timeless, they speak to any and all times. Depending on how well you know a particular classic, and depending on the particular historical moment in time when you return to it, you will come away from it seeing the world anew, and seeing the classic anew, too.
Which is why, treating myself once again to my all-time favorite play — “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder — I was struck by something I had never noted before, despite coming to it back in high school; seeing performances in Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, and Seattle; and studying the play as well.
It is in the play’s last act, Act Three, set in the cemetery of the town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. The Stage Manager, who narrates this chronicle of lives lived in a small town in the early 20th century — enunci-ated by its creator simply as: “This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying” — now is come to “our dying”: He must preside over a burial.
Setting the scene, the Stage Manager, who’s wont to deliver asides about life, delivers a sardonic one: “Wherever you come near the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense.” He then notes the surroundings: “Over there are some Civil War veterans. Iron flags on their graves.” And then, this passage, piercing like an arrow to the throat:
“New Hampshire boys . . . had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than fifty miles of it themselves. All they knew was the name, friends — the United States of America. The United States of America. And they went and died about it.”
If you’re as troubled about the state of the Union as I, your throat will be affected, too. Now, we find the Union under assault — by anti-democratic forces from within — complete with (still astonishing to report) an attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol(!) and (astonishing, too) menaced by armed outfits with puffed-up misnomers like Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, all incited by a “leader” who, to recur to the play (and linger a bit longer away from today’s rancor), is laden with “layers and layers of nonsense.”
Revisiting this play — most Americans know it, coming to it in high school — is at this unhappy juncture tonic, even therapeutic. “Our Town” captures America at its essence; it can be called our original blueprint — democratic, capitalist, individualist. In it we see how a democracy works: individuals dedicated to “the pursuit of happiness,” but a happiness modulated by common sense and plain dealing. Generational in its pulse, the play shows two sets of parents endeavoring to pass on this blueprint to their children — Doc Gibbs and his wife Julia to their children George and Rebecca; Editor Webb and his wife Myrtle to their children Emily and Wally. We see the next generation, George and Emily, step up when they finally, at a charming scene set at a soda fountain, inarticulately get to “Yes” and decide to marry.
Planted in the play are the seeds where the American experiment could “go wrong,” if not managed wisely. This time I noted little Rebecca announcing at breakfast, “Mama, do you know what I love most in the world — do you? Money.” Capitalism’s hierarchy is reflected when, speaking in 1901, the Stage Manager notes, “First automobile’s going to come along in about five years — belonged to Banker Cartwright, our richest citizen.” Another classic play, Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” treats American capitalism, but its Willy Loman manages it . . . not wisely.
A knock on “Our Town” is that it is a white play, very white. As the Stage Manager tells us, “The earliest tombstones in the cemetery up there on the mountain say 1670–1680 — they’re Grovers and Cartwrights and Gibbses and Herseys — same names as are around here now.” Only in passing, when the professor relates the town’s sociology, does he note the original peoples: “Early Amerindian stock . . . now entirely disappeared . . . possible traces in three families”; not a word is said on how that stock disappeared. Newcomers live in their ethnic enclaves: “Polish Town’s across the tracks.” It is not at all clear how Grover’s Corners would adapt to demographic change; but, in school, they would have learned that all Americans are created equal. Would practice bear out theory? In the play, they are challenged by a young man in the audience: “Is there no one in town aware of social injustice?” And, Republicans, take note: Grover’s Corners is 90% Republican — -the once-upon-a-time sane variety. Though, truly, “Our Town” is pre-political, thus its value in our fevered partisan present.
Perhaps I love this play so much, because Grover’s Corners could be my town where I grew up, though my town lies 3,000 miles away and boasts a few thousand more people. The lineaments, the blueprint’s specs, are the same. In small towns everybody’s business is known, not always a good thing; as the Stage Manager says, “we like to know the facts about everybody,” though the choirmaster’s suicide shows not every fact was understood. Like the play’s Doc Gibbs whom we meet after he’s delivered a baby, my Dad was a doctor who delivered a thousand babies, never losing a baby or a mother; the hard cases, the ones he almost lost, came to his retirement to say thanks again. Mom, a former nurse, organized our town’s blood drive; and, reflecting the play’s ecclesiastical element, was a pillar in the church. While still a believer, I have wandered away, but accompanying Mom to church in later years, I always teared up at the Doxology. It’s that way with small towns; the play is called “Our Town,” not “Our City.” Which is why it still hurts that my town was hurt, badly, by Walmart’s invasion in the ’80s. Revival has been slow.
Back to the play, again to the final act, which resonates so deeply at this fraught moment.
Because the conscientious public is anxious for American Democracy, and because I am at a stage in life where family and friends are falling ill or dying, this time another passage — -about the eternal — -also delivered by the Stage Manager near the end, stood out:
“Now there are some things we all know, but we don’t take’m out and look at’m very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.
All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”
And of course, on that mortal note, Emily’s heartbreaking recognitions, as one newly dead (she died giving birth to her second child). How seldom people really look at each other: “We don’t have time to look at one another.” And people going about their daily lives: “I never realized before how troubled and how . . . how in the dark live persons are…. From morning till night, that’s all they are — troubled.” Saying her goodbyes — to her beloveds, her town, to life — Emily breaks down: “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.” Then, her famous insight: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute?,” to which the Stage Manager responds, “No. The saints and poets, maybe — they do some.” Of her dead mother-in-law, she asks: “They don’t understand, do they?” “No, dear. They don’t understand.” Amidst all these recognitions, another voice of the dead says: “My, wasn’t life awful — and wonderful.”
I can’t think, at this leaden moment, of any more powerful words to awaken the numb, the alienated, the polarized.
Touching on our present leaden moment, another passage, this from Act One, struck me specially — -about an earlier civilization, Babylon, enunciated again by the Stage Manager:
“Y’know — Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about ’em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts . . . and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney — same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real life of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then.”
Then the Stage Manager, doing the playwright’s outrageous bidding, announces that, in a reference to the new bank under construction:
“I’m going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now’ll know a few simple facts about us — more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight. / See what I mean? / So — people a thousand years from now — this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.”
Thornton Wilder was an original. This play was “meta” — portraying itself as a play as well as telling a story — well before today’s artistic practice; to wit, its use of a Stage Manager and its opening — “This play is called ‘Our Town.’ It was written by Thornton Wilder.” A device Wilder uses to add depth: Telling us when the characters, while they move before us, will die and how. The paperboy, for one, will die in the coming Great War, in France. Reacting against the “bric-a-brac” sentimentalism of American theatre in the 1920s and ’30s, Wilder sought “to capture not verisimilitude but reality,” a stance putting him in tension with his Broadway producer, who wanted . . . bric-a-brac. The play went on to win the Pulitzer prize for 1938. Wilder knew, as he was writing it, that he had something special. As he wrote Gertrude Stein:
“I am writing the most beautiful little play you can imagine. Every morning brings an hour’s increment to it and that’s all. But I’ve finished two acts already. It’s a little play with all the big subjects in it and it’s a big play with all the little things of life lovingly impressed into it.”
Wilder regarded “Our Town” as “an attempt to find value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.” The play presents, he wrote, “the life of a village against the life of the stars.” Wilder’s dedicated theme as a dramatist was the essential dignity of the human spirit, cast against a deep sense of Time.
At this perilous time in our history, when the vox populi is extreme and unhinged, the voices in this play, and the playwright’s, will brace with their sanity. At a time when we are deeply cynical, not even believing in a New Day, this play shows life in its best, pre-cynical mode. And, Republicans: Remember that 90%. Though, again, this play is pre-political; it is a human document. Everybody: Revisit this classic and be clarified.
Of the productions available online — starring as the Stage Manager such actors as Paul Newman (2003), Hal Holbrook (1977), and Spalding Gray (1989) — I like especially Gray’s interpretation, notably of a line early in the play: “The morning star always gets wonderful bright the minute before it has to go — doesn’t it?” This Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Gregory Mosher, also features superb performances by Penelope Ann Miller as Emily and Eric Stoltz as George. There is also the 1940 film with the young William Holden playing George and a musical score by Aaron Copland.
