Our Town (1938)
THEMES
(1) The Theater
One of the most striking features of Our Town is the way in which the play repeatedly breaks the so-called “fourth wall”, the imaginary division between the world of the stage and the audience that nearly all drama respects. This happens mostly through the character of the stage manager, but also through scenes in which characters like Professor Willard speak directly to the audience. The play also includes a scene in act one in which actors playing audience members participate in the play, entering into dialogue with the stage manager on-stage. In addition to all this, the play makes no attempt to create a realistic backdrop on the stage. The actors generally pantomime (pretend that they are interacting with things on-stage we cannot see) and there are hardly any props on the stage. The upper levels of the Webbs’ and Gibbs’ houses are represented simply by two ladders, which George and Emily climb up when they “go upstairs”. As these details of staging demonstrate, the play is not interested in pretending to be real. The fourth wall, props, and elaborate stage sets are all ways of encouraging the audience to pretend that what they are watching is real, and not an artistic representation of reality. By contrast, Wilder’s play emphasizes itself as artificial theater, laying bare the fact that theater is always an illusion, no matter how realistic.
This constant reminder that we are experiencing a fictional story rather than the true lives of the characters on the stage has several effects. First, the town of Grover’s Corners becomes less specific and more abstract. It can thus be seen somewhat symbolically or allegorically; it could represent any town, or all towns. Second, these features have an alienating effect on the audience. Unlike with other plays, we do not feel immersed in Grover’s Corners, but constantly feel as though we are outside the world of the play, looking in at lives that have already happened and are now just being recalled, re-presented. The position of the audience in Wilder’s play is eerily similar to that of Emily after she dies and goes back to relive a moment from her youth. Like her, the audience knows what will happen to most of the characters on-stage (thanks to the stage manager), which lends both a kind of sorrow and significance to the everyday activities we observe in the play. Finally, Wilder’s innovations blur the boundaries between the play and the real world. The stage manager refers to the town as if he is a resident, but he knows that the play is just a play. In act one, Mr. Webb speaks directly to the audience at one point, as if he knows he is in a play, but elsewhere he is fully immersed in the world of Grover’s Corners. When are these characters being those characters and when are they just actors? We cannot neatly distinguish the world of the play from the real world. Even the entrance of audience members into the theater is included in Wilder’s script, in the stage directions that begin the play. Is the audience actually part of the play? Is Our Town really ours, as well? Paradoxically, by exposing the illusions and artificiality of theater, Wilder brings theater closer to real life.
(2) Community
Our Town revolves around the community of the classic American small town of Grover’s Corners. The town is characterized by its small size, closeness, and familiarity. Everyone there knows each other (which is occasionally cause for town gossip) and goes to the same schools and churches. The town is filled with features of early twentieth century Americana, from the ice cream sodas George and Emily order at the local drugstore to the importance of baseball to the town’s youth. The title of the play emphasizes the importance of community: the town belongs to all those who live there and share it. And those who live in Grover’s Corners rarely leave. The same families have been living in the town and burying their dead in the same cemetery for years, and most of the high school students there will eventually settle down in their home town. Even the dead don’t leave Grover’s Corners, as we see in act three with the deceased characters lingering around the town cemetery.
Wilder’s play is in many ways an ode to these kinds of classic American small towns—a dying breed in the twentieth century—as he lovingly documents their quirks and features, like the local milkman (Howie Newsome) bringing milk to everyone’s door. However, the play’s stance toward such a local community can be seen as slightly more ambiguous. The small-town atmosphere of Grover’s Corners can also be suffocating. There is something troubling about the spirits of the dead simply lingering around the town, whose magnetic pull keeps George from exploring his talents in baseball or even going to agricultural college. Emily is extremely gifted and talented in school, but she never pursues any further education, opting to settle down with George at a young age. People seem content to stay in Grover’s Corners, but this lack of ambition can also be seen as a negative thing. Mrs. Gibbs, for example, dreams of seeing Paris one day, and speaks of the value of traveling and seeing some of the world: “once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and don’t even want to,” she tells Dr. Webb in act one. Thus, while Wilder paints a loving portrait of small-town America, he also subtly points to some of its limitations. The play’s stance toward Grover’s Corners and its citizens is split between a nostalgia for simpler times and a knowing pretension toward the community’s isolated, occasionally naïve members.
(3) The Everyday and the Ordinary
In act one, Wilder chooses to tell the story of a perfectly ordinary day, when nothing particularly exciting or extraordinary happens. While acts two and three represent significant occasions (a wedding and a funeral), they are important events in the lives of ordinary people. The play could just have easily have been written about other inhabitants of Grover’s Corners, or about the people of some other small town. In act one, Dr. Gibbs asks the paperboy Joe Crowell if there is anything important in the newspaper, and the biggest news that Crowell can relay is that a schoolteacher is getting married. Nothing particularly newsworthy happens in Grover’s Corners and even the characters themselves recognize the unremarkable nature of their town. In act one, Mr. Webb tells the audience that it is a “very ordinary town, if you ask me. Little better behaved than most. Probably a lot duller.” And when George is considering going off the agricultural college and asks Emily to write him, she doubts whether letters from Grover’s Corners would be very interesting.
And yet, Wilder’s play insists on the importance of the everyday, the typical, and the average. George tells Emily, “The day wouldn’t come when I wouldn’t want to know everything that’s happening here.” By even writing a play entirely about everyday occurrences, Wilder makes a statement that these ordinary things are valuable and worth preserving in art and literature. One reason for this is supplied by the stage manager. While thinking about the town’s time capsule, he notes that we know nothing of the everyday lives of people from the distant past. Epochal events and great leaders of history do nothing to suggest the particular, unique experiences of everyday individuals.
Our Town, by contrast, preserves such information. And when the deceased Emily revisits her childhood in act three, the other deceased characters encourage her to pick an ordinary day. As the cemetery in act three demonstrates, we all die. What gives an individual’s life significance in the grand scheme of things is in the little details of a life, the specific, everyday things that make one life different from another and make our individual experiences unique. There may be nothing exciting in the town newspaper of Grover’s Corners, but Wilder ultimately suggests that the most important things in life aren’t necessarily the things that end up on the front page.
(4) Marriage and the Family
The town of Grover’s Corners is built on the smaller community of the family. The family unit is the building block of the town, where the same family names can be found on tombstones in the town cemetery going back many years. The first act of Our Town focuses mostly on two homes, those of the Gibbs and the Webbs, where the central family structure can be seen, with husband, wife, and children. Marriage is the essential union of two people that creates this family unit.
The second act of the play is centered around the creation of a new family through the marriage of George and Emily. Mr. Webb stresses to George that he is a firm believer in the importance of marriage, and Mrs. Gibbs insists that “people are meant to go through life two by two.” However, characters in the play also regard the institution of marriage more negatively at times. Both Emily and George panic as their wedding draws near, and Emily tells her father that she does not want to get married. This is partly because marriage means growing up and leaving the comfortable family structure she is used to. While George and Emily come around to marrying each other, some doubts about marriage linger in the play. Mrs. Webb says at one point that “there’s something downright cruel about sending our girls into marriage this way,” and Mrs. Gibbs calls wedding ceremonies “perfectly awful things,” and “farces.”
Moreover, marriages in Our Town tend to place wives in somewhat submissive roles. While Dr. Gibbs and Mr. Webb are loving husbands, they tend to exert some kind of control over their wives or at least have the final word in their marriages. We see this especially when Dr. Gibbs continually squashes any discussion his wife wants to have about traveling outside of Grover’s Corners or his taking a vacation from work. Nonetheless, as the ultimately happy union between George and Emily suggests, Wilder presents marriage as a beneficial institution, the fundamental building block of both the family and the town community, even if there are tragic or imperfect undertones in the play’s marriages.
(5) Time, Change, and Continuity
The play’s three acts focus on three different moments in time: one day during Emily and George’s childhood, their wedding, and Emily’s funeral. In addition, there is a long flash-back in act two and Emily revisits a moment from her childhood in act three. Moreover, the stage manager repeatedly tells the audience information about characters’ futures, revealing the tragic death of Joe Crowell, for example, while he is still a young boy on-stage. By jumping around in time, Wilder’s play is able to examine the passage of time from a variety of angles, more than if it simply followed characters’ lives in a strictly linear, chronological fashion. The stage manager’s thoughts on the town’s time capsule also offer an opportunity to think about time, as the stage manager imagines how the future will remember his own time. Much of the play reveals the sadness of the quick passing of time, which means growing up, leaving behind the innocence of childhood, getting older, approaching death, and dying, all more quickly than the characters ever expect. Even while Joe Crowell is still a young paperboy, we learn of his eventual death at war. Emily is a young woman in act one with a promising future, but she is leaving her childhood behind in act two to marry George, and she is already dead by the time act three begins.
The inevitable passage of time affects not only individual people, but also the town at large. As automobiles threaten to replace buggies, Mr. Morgan (played by the stage manager) laments the changes coming to Grover’s Corners: “I tell you, you’ve got to look both ways before you cross Main Street these days. Gets worse every year.” Similarly, in act one Mrs. Gibbs notices that people are beginning to lock their doors at night in Grover’s Corners and Dr. Gibbs regrets that “they’re all getting citified.” The passage of time, with its technological advances and the growth of small towns into larger cities, threatens to change and drastically alter the small town that the play’s characters value so much.
However, as much as things change, in many ways they also stay the same. In each act, the same milkman, Howie Newsome, makes his way around the town. The same routines and events continually repeat in the town. Children go to the school, a paperboy delivers the newspaper, citizens get married, and citizens pass away. Emily’s death during child-birth encapsulates this cyclical aspect of time. Her life comes to an end just as another begins. While individuals grow up too fast and pass away, the human cycles of life and death remain constant. This may be one reason why Wilder’s play takes such an interest in everyday, little matters. From a broad perspective, as time inevitably progresses along, important things—births, marriages, deaths—remain unaltered. But the little things are where people are unique, where one can see how one birth or one wedding is different from all the others. This is why the stage manager thinks Our Town is worth preserving for posterity in the town’s time capsule. In its exploration of the mundane specificities of individual lives, it allows us to reflect on how much the world changes and how much it stays the same.
(1) The Theater
One of the most striking features of Our Town is the way in which the play repeatedly breaks the so-called “fourth wall”, the imaginary division between the world of the stage and the audience that nearly all drama respects. This happens mostly through the character of the stage manager, but also through scenes in which characters like Professor Willard speak directly to the audience. The play also includes a scene in act one in which actors playing audience members participate in the play, entering into dialogue with the stage manager on-stage. In addition to all this, the play makes no attempt to create a realistic backdrop on the stage. The actors generally pantomime (pretend that they are interacting with things on-stage we cannot see) and there are hardly any props on the stage. The upper levels of the Webbs’ and Gibbs’ houses are represented simply by two ladders, which George and Emily climb up when they “go upstairs”. As these details of staging demonstrate, the play is not interested in pretending to be real. The fourth wall, props, and elaborate stage sets are all ways of encouraging the audience to pretend that what they are watching is real, and not an artistic representation of reality. By contrast, Wilder’s play emphasizes itself as artificial theater, laying bare the fact that theater is always an illusion, no matter how realistic.
This constant reminder that we are experiencing a fictional story rather than the true lives of the characters on the stage has several effects. First, the town of Grover’s Corners becomes less specific and more abstract. It can thus be seen somewhat symbolically or allegorically; it could represent any town, or all towns. Second, these features have an alienating effect on the audience. Unlike with other plays, we do not feel immersed in Grover’s Corners, but constantly feel as though we are outside the world of the play, looking in at lives that have already happened and are now just being recalled, re-presented. The position of the audience in Wilder’s play is eerily similar to that of Emily after she dies and goes back to relive a moment from her youth. Like her, the audience knows what will happen to most of the characters on-stage (thanks to the stage manager), which lends both a kind of sorrow and significance to the everyday activities we observe in the play. Finally, Wilder’s innovations blur the boundaries between the play and the real world. The stage manager refers to the town as if he is a resident, but he knows that the play is just a play. In act one, Mr. Webb speaks directly to the audience at one point, as if he knows he is in a play, but elsewhere he is fully immersed in the world of Grover’s Corners. When are these characters being those characters and when are they just actors? We cannot neatly distinguish the world of the play from the real world. Even the entrance of audience members into the theater is included in Wilder’s script, in the stage directions that begin the play. Is the audience actually part of the play? Is Our Town really ours, as well? Paradoxically, by exposing the illusions and artificiality of theater, Wilder brings theater closer to real life.
(2) Community
Our Town revolves around the community of the classic American small town of Grover’s Corners. The town is characterized by its small size, closeness, and familiarity. Everyone there knows each other (which is occasionally cause for town gossip) and goes to the same schools and churches. The town is filled with features of early twentieth century Americana, from the ice cream sodas George and Emily order at the local drugstore to the importance of baseball to the town’s youth. The title of the play emphasizes the importance of community: the town belongs to all those who live there and share it. And those who live in Grover’s Corners rarely leave. The same families have been living in the town and burying their dead in the same cemetery for years, and most of the high school students there will eventually settle down in their home town. Even the dead don’t leave Grover’s Corners, as we see in act three with the deceased characters lingering around the town cemetery.
Wilder’s play is in many ways an ode to these kinds of classic American small towns—a dying breed in the twentieth century—as he lovingly documents their quirks and features, like the local milkman (Howie Newsome) bringing milk to everyone’s door. However, the play’s stance toward such a local community can be seen as slightly more ambiguous. The small-town atmosphere of Grover’s Corners can also be suffocating. There is something troubling about the spirits of the dead simply lingering around the town, whose magnetic pull keeps George from exploring his talents in baseball or even going to agricultural college. Emily is extremely gifted and talented in school, but she never pursues any further education, opting to settle down with George at a young age. People seem content to stay in Grover’s Corners, but this lack of ambition can also be seen as a negative thing. Mrs. Gibbs, for example, dreams of seeing Paris one day, and speaks of the value of traveling and seeing some of the world: “once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and don’t even want to,” she tells Dr. Webb in act one. Thus, while Wilder paints a loving portrait of small-town America, he also subtly points to some of its limitations. The play’s stance toward Grover’s Corners and its citizens is split between a nostalgia for simpler times and a knowing pretension toward the community’s isolated, occasionally naïve members.
(3) The Everyday and the Ordinary
In act one, Wilder chooses to tell the story of a perfectly ordinary day, when nothing particularly exciting or extraordinary happens. While acts two and three represent significant occasions (a wedding and a funeral), they are important events in the lives of ordinary people. The play could just have easily have been written about other inhabitants of Grover’s Corners, or about the people of some other small town. In act one, Dr. Gibbs asks the paperboy Joe Crowell if there is anything important in the newspaper, and the biggest news that Crowell can relay is that a schoolteacher is getting married. Nothing particularly newsworthy happens in Grover’s Corners and even the characters themselves recognize the unremarkable nature of their town. In act one, Mr. Webb tells the audience that it is a “very ordinary town, if you ask me. Little better behaved than most. Probably a lot duller.” And when George is considering going off the agricultural college and asks Emily to write him, she doubts whether letters from Grover’s Corners would be very interesting.
And yet, Wilder’s play insists on the importance of the everyday, the typical, and the average. George tells Emily, “The day wouldn’t come when I wouldn’t want to know everything that’s happening here.” By even writing a play entirely about everyday occurrences, Wilder makes a statement that these ordinary things are valuable and worth preserving in art and literature. One reason for this is supplied by the stage manager. While thinking about the town’s time capsule, he notes that we know nothing of the everyday lives of people from the distant past. Epochal events and great leaders of history do nothing to suggest the particular, unique experiences of everyday individuals.
Our Town, by contrast, preserves such information. And when the deceased Emily revisits her childhood in act three, the other deceased characters encourage her to pick an ordinary day. As the cemetery in act three demonstrates, we all die. What gives an individual’s life significance in the grand scheme of things is in the little details of a life, the specific, everyday things that make one life different from another and make our individual experiences unique. There may be nothing exciting in the town newspaper of Grover’s Corners, but Wilder ultimately suggests that the most important things in life aren’t necessarily the things that end up on the front page.
(4) Marriage and the Family
The town of Grover’s Corners is built on the smaller community of the family. The family unit is the building block of the town, where the same family names can be found on tombstones in the town cemetery going back many years. The first act of Our Town focuses mostly on two homes, those of the Gibbs and the Webbs, where the central family structure can be seen, with husband, wife, and children. Marriage is the essential union of two people that creates this family unit.
The second act of the play is centered around the creation of a new family through the marriage of George and Emily. Mr. Webb stresses to George that he is a firm believer in the importance of marriage, and Mrs. Gibbs insists that “people are meant to go through life two by two.” However, characters in the play also regard the institution of marriage more negatively at times. Both Emily and George panic as their wedding draws near, and Emily tells her father that she does not want to get married. This is partly because marriage means growing up and leaving the comfortable family structure she is used to. While George and Emily come around to marrying each other, some doubts about marriage linger in the play. Mrs. Webb says at one point that “there’s something downright cruel about sending our girls into marriage this way,” and Mrs. Gibbs calls wedding ceremonies “perfectly awful things,” and “farces.”
Moreover, marriages in Our Town tend to place wives in somewhat submissive roles. While Dr. Gibbs and Mr. Webb are loving husbands, they tend to exert some kind of control over their wives or at least have the final word in their marriages. We see this especially when Dr. Gibbs continually squashes any discussion his wife wants to have about traveling outside of Grover’s Corners or his taking a vacation from work. Nonetheless, as the ultimately happy union between George and Emily suggests, Wilder presents marriage as a beneficial institution, the fundamental building block of both the family and the town community, even if there are tragic or imperfect undertones in the play’s marriages.
(5) Time, Change, and Continuity
The play’s three acts focus on three different moments in time: one day during Emily and George’s childhood, their wedding, and Emily’s funeral. In addition, there is a long flash-back in act two and Emily revisits a moment from her childhood in act three. Moreover, the stage manager repeatedly tells the audience information about characters’ futures, revealing the tragic death of Joe Crowell, for example, while he is still a young boy on-stage. By jumping around in time, Wilder’s play is able to examine the passage of time from a variety of angles, more than if it simply followed characters’ lives in a strictly linear, chronological fashion. The stage manager’s thoughts on the town’s time capsule also offer an opportunity to think about time, as the stage manager imagines how the future will remember his own time. Much of the play reveals the sadness of the quick passing of time, which means growing up, leaving behind the innocence of childhood, getting older, approaching death, and dying, all more quickly than the characters ever expect. Even while Joe Crowell is still a young paperboy, we learn of his eventual death at war. Emily is a young woman in act one with a promising future, but she is leaving her childhood behind in act two to marry George, and she is already dead by the time act three begins.
The inevitable passage of time affects not only individual people, but also the town at large. As automobiles threaten to replace buggies, Mr. Morgan (played by the stage manager) laments the changes coming to Grover’s Corners: “I tell you, you’ve got to look both ways before you cross Main Street these days. Gets worse every year.” Similarly, in act one Mrs. Gibbs notices that people are beginning to lock their doors at night in Grover’s Corners and Dr. Gibbs regrets that “they’re all getting citified.” The passage of time, with its technological advances and the growth of small towns into larger cities, threatens to change and drastically alter the small town that the play’s characters value so much.
However, as much as things change, in many ways they also stay the same. In each act, the same milkman, Howie Newsome, makes his way around the town. The same routines and events continually repeat in the town. Children go to the school, a paperboy delivers the newspaper, citizens get married, and citizens pass away. Emily’s death during child-birth encapsulates this cyclical aspect of time. Her life comes to an end just as another begins. While individuals grow up too fast and pass away, the human cycles of life and death remain constant. This may be one reason why Wilder’s play takes such an interest in everyday, little matters. From a broad perspective, as time inevitably progresses along, important things—births, marriages, deaths—remain unaltered. But the little things are where people are unique, where one can see how one birth or one wedding is different from all the others. This is why the stage manager thinks Our Town is worth preserving for posterity in the town’s time capsule. In its exploration of the mundane specificities of individual lives, it allows us to reflect on how much the world changes and how much it stays the same.