Our Town. A play in three acts by Thornton Wilder. New York premiere: Henry Miller Theater, 4 February 1938. Technical director: Raymond Sovey; costume design: Madame Hélène Pons; produced and directed by Jed Harris. With Frank Craven (Stage Manager), Martha Scott (Emily Webb), Jay Fassett, Evelyn Varden, John Craven, Marilyn Erskine, Thomas Ross, Helen Carew, Charles Wiley, Jr., Doro Merande and Philip Coolidge. Closed 19 February 1939 (336 performances). Text: Our Town: A Play in Three Acts, New York: HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 2003. Includes introduction by Donald Margulies and afterword by Tappan Wilder.

Before writing about American drama after 1945, one must look briefly at American drama at least a few years prior to 1945 — ideally, perhaps, ten years before, before American participation in World War Two could be confidently expected. The Broadway stage in the two decades preceding Pearl Harbor, though populated by European classics, dramas by Lillian Hellman, Robert E. Sherwood, Maxwell Anderson and Sidney Howard and new comedies by Philip Barry, Kaufman & Hart and others, also saw a wealth of formal and thematic exploration and experimentation that the current Broadway theatregoer can only dream about. The first true “Broadway musical,” Show Boat by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, had opened only in 1927, and plays by Elmer Rice and Eugene O’Neill had flirted — sometimes with great success, sometimes disastrously — with innovations like Expressionism; in the 1930s, these writers were joined by Clifford Odets (who debuted in 1935 with the bare-stage agit-prop Waiting for Lefty at Broadway’s Longacre Theater) and the plays of the Group Theater, as well as Federal Theatre Project productions like Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock and, further uptown, Orson Welles’”voodoo” Macbeth. Also in 1935, rather startlingly, one finds the presence of Bertolt Brecht just south of Broadway in a Theatre Union production of one of his most ideologically explicit Communist plays, The Mother (a production for which Brecht, who traveled to America for the premiere, had little but contempt, with the exception of Mordecai Gorelik’s sets); in 1933, The Threepenny Opera had been produced at Broadway’s Empire Theatre for a run of 12 performances.

By February 1938, the worst of the Depression was over, and Germany’s invasion of Poland was more than a year-and-a-half away. As Broadway and other New York theatre activity in those years attested, producers and playwrights were far from producing mere comfortable entertainment for an upper-middle-class audience (at least, not exclusively); the mainstream theatre was contributing to the political and aesthetic life of the times with considerable sophistication. It was into this culture that Jed Harris launched Thornton Wilder‘s Our Town at the Henry Miller Theater — a play which, despite mixed critical reviews, was a popular success from the moment of its premiere.

Its popular success is at once easily explicable and a mystery. The “plot,” such as it is, we shall take as read: three days in the quotidian life of a small (population: 2,640 at curtain rise) New England town in the years immediately preceding the First World War — a 1901 “day in our town,” the 1904 marriage of two of its young people, and the 1913 death of one of these two. With an elegant plainspeech, the characters move from morning to night in each of the three acts, taking if not pleasure than comfort in their everyday lives — the play “an attempt,” Wilder wrote in a 1957 preface, “to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily lives.” (171)[1] In its attempt to unite cosmic significance with the quotidian trivial, it clearly appeals to the democratic ideology which provided the strength to survive the catastrophe of both the Great War and the Depression.

And yet it is a death-laced play from start to finish. Though there is a mention of an early-morning birth of twins in 1901, this is quickly undercut by the Stage Manager’s references to the deaths of two major characters (Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs) before they even appear on the stage (7), and before the play is ten minutes old he describes the death of another in the Great War (9). The second act, “Love and Marriage,” provides some appeal of sentimental romance, but even at the opening of this act, the Stage Manager mentions that “There’s another act coming after this: I reckon you can guess what that’s about” (48), a suggestion that hangs over the surprisingly tense and darkly anxious proceedings of the rest of the act.

While not a tragic play — Wilder’s metaphysics are ultimately far too optimistic to levy that charge against it — it is nonetheless a play of subtle, complex melancholia. Nor could the charge of nostalgia for small-town values be attached to it, however much it may have done in the decades after its premiere. It is a play of quite remarkable tensions and dynamics: between death and life (Emily, after all, dies giving birth to her second child), between calm and anxiety, and between innocence and experience. For Grover’s Corners is not an innocent landscape, and its characters not entirely pure. At the wedding, Emily’s mother turns to the audience and admits, “Oh, I’ve got to say it: you know, there’s something downright cruel about sending our girls out into marriage this way. I hope some of her girl friends have told her a thing or two. It’s cruel, I know, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. I went into it blind as a bat myself. (In half-amused exasperation.) The whole world’s wrong, that’s what’s the matter.” (76) For her part, a few minutes before the ceremony, Emily begs her father: “Let’s go away, — … Don’t you remember that you used to say,– all the time you used to say– all the time: that I was your girl! There must be lots of places we can go to. I’ll work for you. I could keep house” (79). And George begins a retreat into adolescence: “Ma, I don’t want to grow old. Why’s everybody pushing me so?” (77) The wedding that follows, while celebratory, is not enough to fully resolve these deep-seated anxieties: sex itself as potential catastrophe (and — through extension into Emily’s death during childbirth — real catastrophe as well).

The most interesting conflict between form and metaphysics occurs in the last act, as “dead” characters are lined up in two rows of simple chairs as representation of a cemetery. “The theater longs to represent the symbols of things, not the things themselves” (156) Wilder wrote in an essay about the play for the New York Times in 1938 — indeed, the Stage Manager gives the lie to the idea of an afterlife of continued consciousness, despite the conversations that occur between the “dead” characters on the stage. “Some of the things they’re going to say maybe’ll hurt your feelings — but that’s the way it is,” he tells the audience. “Mother ‘n daughter … husband ‘n wife … enemy ‘n enemy … money ‘n miser … all those terribly important things kind of grow pale around here. And what’s left when memory’s gone, and your identity, Mrs. Smith?” (88) I add the emphasis here to underscore Wilder’s apparent refusal to provide the comfort of eternal identity, of eternal consciousness, despite the individuals clearly seated upon the stage and speaking as their characters spoke earlier in the play. There is a tension between identity and nothingness, between stage convention and “truth,” that perhaps provided the chill that led many detractors of the play to call it “depressing” — and indeed, they were right.

In part, another tension lay in Wilder’s metaphysics itself. Our Town balances on a fence between the “Ah!” of the philosopher and poet and the “Aww!” of the mawkish sentimentalist, a condition of which Wilder seems to have been well aware. However the play may have generated tears in the eyes of its audience, these tears, he warned, should in no way be in the eyes of its performers. He had serious reservations about the original Jed Harris production, complaining of “tasteless alterations.” In a note to the play, written in preparation for a 1946 London production by the same director, Wilder specifically addressed this lugubriousness: “The speeches of the seated dead must be kept ‘matter-of-fact’ and un-lugubrious. … Emily is to refrain from tears and sobbing … George with his mother and Emily with her father in the scene immediately prior to the wedding are to use moderation in weeping and embracing … Mrs. Webb in her address to the audience prior to the wedding is to use restraint in emphasis and not to weep or sob at all.” (164-165)

In part, this represents an attempt to maintain the New England stoicism of both dialogue and character, but in part this is also an aggressive response to stage naturalism and realism, an admission of the metaphorical character of all stage work as Wilder conceived it: a presentation of “the symbols of things, not the things themselves,” which includes the condition of death.

Our Town does not always maintain that equilibrium of stoic metaphysics and sentimentalism. Emily concludes her last major speech with “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you”; Simon Stimson’s caustic characterization of life as “ignorance and blindness” is countered by Mrs. Gibbs’ “Simon Stimson, that ain’t the whole truth and you know it” (108-109) — though significantly she does not explicitly deny that Stimson’s outburst has a truth of its own. The Stage Manager himself, in his last major speech, rather brutally refers to the pain and endless striving of the human condition: “Only [this planet] is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. The strain’s so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest” (111) — which can be read in a variety of ways, though Wilder suggests, in the Stage Manager’s description of a consciousless death, that this strain is ultimately towards nothingness.

In this sense, Our Town is melancholia in an American vein, specifically American in its New World setting: unlike the small towns of Europe, Grover’s Corners has to date been untouched by war and violent death on its ground, lending it an illusory innocence. (Though historically New Hampshire sent several brigades into battle in the Civil War — and Dr. Gibbs is an enthusiast of Civil War history — the War itself did not physically touch the state, and the timeline of the play is significantly set before the Great War.) It is not the American small town that is the ultimate subject of the play, but the American consciousness itself, a consciousness that was bruited about considerably in the century that followed. It is a consciousness interestingly informed by the ambivalence of ambition itself, of paths not taken, of resignation to a provincial ideal. Mrs. Gibbs’ hope to see Paris before she dies is consistently thwarted by the refusal of her husband to accompany her, and she leaves the money saved for this trip, her “legacy,” as a wedding gift to her son and daughter-in-law. The sole artist-figure in town, choirmaster Simon Stimson, is a notorious drunk who commits suicide (leaving instructions to decorate his tombstone with “just some notes of music,” says a character, rather than an epitaph [91]). There is something here that explains its continuing appeal, even to experimental and avant-garde theatre artists like The Wooster Group, which appropriated the play for its 1981 production Route 1 & 9 (as they have continued to appropriate plays from the American canon: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in L.S.D., productions of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, and most recently Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré, which premiered at this year’s Edinburgh Festival).

If there is nostalgia that attaches to the play now, it is to that prelapsarian consciousness and not the American small town itself. In any event, Wilder was not finished with the American small town, nor for that matter with the American consciousness. Four years later, he wrote Shadow of a Doubt for Alfred Hitchcock, a film set in the real-life town of Santa Rosa, California, a work, like all of Hitchcock’s films, similarly laced with death. In the doubling of the characters of Charlie and Uncle Charlie and the macabre playfulness with homicidal plans shared by Joseph Newton and Herbie Hawkins, Wilder suggests that the possibility for evil lay ineradicably in the blood of these smalltown inhabitants as well. But in 1942 the Second World War was well under way, Hitler in power and the camps in operation, and the Hiroshima bomb only three years into the future.

Photo: Thornton Wilder in one of his several performances as the Stage Manager in Our Town. Copyright © College of Wooster

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Samples of Stage Managers past, courtesy of YouTube. First, Spalding Gray in the 1988 Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Gregory Mosher, from the opening of Act I:

Then, a few years later, Paul Newman in Act III of the 2002 James Naughton production:

1. In the 1960s, it should be added, Wilder retracted this in a handwritten note: “But that is absurd,” he says of his original statement. “The generations of men follow upon one another in apparently endless repetition. They are born; they grow up; they marry; they have children; they die. Where shall we seek a ‘value above all price’ in these recurrent situations? The audience in a theatre watches human beings caught up in the happy or unhappy vicissitudes of circumstance. The audience knows more about what most concerns the characters than they can ever know themselves. The audience is given a more than human vision. … [The spectator] learns that each life — though it appears to be a repetition among millions — can be felt to be inestimably precious. Though the realization of it is present to us seldom, briefly, and incommunicably. At that moment there are no walls, no chairs, no tables: all is inward. Our true life is the imagination and in the memory.” (171-172) [↩]