Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is among the pantheon of American plays, perennially appearing on nearly every list of top-ten classics. It is a legendary list, including such iconic works as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (“The only thing you've got in this world is what you can sell.”), Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun (“Money is life. Once upon a time freedom used to be life—now it's money.”), and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”)
First performed in 1938, near the end of the Great Depression, Our Town was immediately acclaimed, winning that year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Like all enduring literary works, its message extends beyond the here and the now, for great art, in all its forms, touches something deep and elemental in the human spirit.
Our Town touched me, over fifty years ago, as a high school student in the Ozarks of rural Arkansas. At the time, I had never seen a theatrical production other than our amateurish school plays. Though the script of Our Town was set in a New England town far removed from my southern roots, it still resonates today.
For those who have never read Our Town or seen it performed, it is a metatheatrical piece, a play-within-a-play, where the main actor, the Stage Manager, breaks the fourth wall and speaks frequently and directly to the audience, narrating and explaining aspects of the play while also participating in it. Adding to the play’s distinctiveness, the remaining actors perform largely without props, relying on mime to convey actions and meanings.
Beyond its minimalist staging, and its artifice with the form, Our Town is a reflection on life and its meaning, seen through the eyes of everyday people, living in the fictional New Hampshire town of Grover’s Corners. It is an unconventional morality play about a place where, as the Stage Manager wryly observes, “Nobody very remarkable ever come out of it, s'far as we know.”
Though the town of Grover’s Corners is fictional, a product of Wilder’s imagination, it feels timelessly real, imbued with the friendly (and not so friendly) rivalries and small-town gossip that I immediately recognized as the lifeblood of my own small-town life. As a teenager from the Arkansas backwoods, it was a place I knew well, and it felt like home, despite its New England setting.
Our Town: A Mediation on Life and Eternity
Act One of Our Town, aptly titled “Daily Life,” describes the ordinary and pedestrian day-to-day activities of Grover’s Corners’ small-town residents. The byplay between the Stage Manager and the other actors in Our Town, as well as the Stage Manager’s commentary on them and their lives, bely the later reflections on eternity.
Against this backdrop, Act Two, “Love and Marriage,” set three years later, chronicles the wedding of two childhood sweethearts, George and Emily. There, the Stage Manager explains that love is a strange thing, like sleepwalking:
You know how it is; you're twenty-one or twenty-two and you make some decisions; then whisssh! you're seventy… you've been a lawyer for fifty years and that white-haired lady at your side has eaten over fifty thousand meals with you. How do such things begin?
It is a feeling we all know. How did these choices shape my life? Where did the time go? Did I fritter my life away? Just yesterday, I was young and filled with vigor, with my life before me. Who is this aged and stooped person now staring back at me in the mirror?
All this is the prelude to the denouement in Act Three, “Death and Eternity,” which begins nine years after the wedding. As the act opens, Emily has just died in childbirth. At Emily’s funeral, both the living and the dead gather, and the deceased Emily converses with the other dead, longing to experience again just one day of her all-too-brief life.
Against the strong admonitions from the dead to avoid spending time with the living, she revisits a joyful day – her 12th birthday – with the assistance of the Stage Manager. Only then does she realize how blind the living often are to the importance of treasuring the simple things and living in every moment.
In a haunting realization, Emily plaintively asks the Stage Manager, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it … every, every minute?” In the play’s most famous line, the Stage Manager replies wanly, “No. The saints and poets, maybe – they do some.”
After this brief sojourn in the afterlife, the play then ends as it began. The Stage Manager reassumes his small-town mien, addresses the audience, and bids everyone farewell, “Hm … Eleven o’clock in Grover’s Corners … You get a good rest, too. Good night.”
Naïveté and Teenaged Angst
As a middle school and high school student, like millions of others, I performed in a variety of school plays. Despite – or perhaps because – they were crafted for inexperienced high school actors, the one act plays – all comedies in my case – were excruciatingly bad; the tropes were tired and superficial, and the teenaged acting was stilted.
Our plays were neither Hamlet nor Macbeth, and we were no itinerant Shakespeare troupe, nor did any Juilliard-trained thespians with Tony Award dreams lurk among us. Having ravaged our little library’s collection of plays and literature, this truth was painfully obvious to me. (See Libraries: Arms Too Short to Feed the Mind) I have no doubt my teachers knew all this too. Nevertheless, the show must go on; it was an expected school ritual, however superficial and bland.
Dismayed by the insipid banality of our lines, I beseeched my English teacher, offering my services as an anonymous script doctor, hoping to augment one of our little plays with fourth wall commentary, in the spirit of Our Town. Wisely, the teacher demurred. Perhaps they thought I lacked the skill, or – equally likely – feared an outpouring of teenaged ennui, my own embodiment of Simon & Garfunkel’s My Little Town, might ruin the putative entertainment. I might have risked embarrassment, but the teacher would have received the blame. In retrospect, the teacher was right. (See Thoreau, Angst, Ennui, and Coming of Age)
Filled with hubris, I was too naïve to understand the zeitgeist or to appreciate my own reality. Our theatergoers were not urbane sophisticates, fresh from dinner on the town, anticipating the latest avant-garde musical or thought provoking theatrical piece from Broadway or the West End.
Instead, all of us, actors and audience alike, were the hoi polloi, groundlings one and all. The cafetorium was not a decorated set piece; it was a place we ate free and reduced price school lunches each day – 20 cents for those who could pay – pinto beans and boiled greens, applesauce and Jell-O, with rolls and sorghum molasses. As for me, I walked home from school each day to a ramshackle old house with only one heated room.
As my aging grandfather, Sidney, would say, “Book learnin’ don’t make you smart, boy.” Though he only had a third grade education, my grandfather spoke wise words. I was young, and I had learned much from books, but I lacked the wisdom only a lived life can provide. I was too stupid to see and appreciate the truth, blind in my own way to the central message of Our Town.
These small-town, overwhelmingly poor, parents did not come to the high school cafetorium on a weeknight, tired from manual labor, to struggle with existential questions about life’s meaning and purpose, whether the Münchhausen trilemma, the Hegelian dialectic, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Descartes Discourse on the Method, or even a Socratic dialogue. They paid the Sunday morning preacher to resolve all such questions of the here and now and the hereafter, wrapped in clear and simple homilies.
No, the parents came to see their child perform on the cafetorium stage – any theatrical vehicle would suffice. (Well, perhaps not a nude performance of Hair.) In the performance, they found emotional meaning and the sustenance to face another day, their own glimpse of Wilder’s truth.
Ironically, the parents from my rural Arkansas town would have all recognized Grover’s Corners, with its small-town atmosphere and ethos. It was a place much like our own, one where generations shared the same stories of aunts and uncles, grandparents, and great grandparents. A place where nothing remarkable happened.
Acting Fantasies
Despite my thwarted high school theater ambitions, I still harbor unrequited fantasies of playing Our Town’s Stage Manager. Dressed in a gray, three-piece suit, a dark tie, and a well-worn fedora, angled just so, I would walk on stage, perch on a high stool, doff my hat, and place it on my knee. There, I would bring my best Gregory Peck impersonation – earnest, wise, and serious – from that other American classic, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Looking thoughtfully into the stage lights, I would utter the play’s famous first line, “This play is called ‘Our Town.’ The day is May 7, 1901. The time is just before dawn.”
Alas, I doubt my acting fantasy will ever be realized. Only once have I ever seen my name on literal marquee lights, when I held a public futurist discussion with Bruce Sterling, the science fiction author. Even then, I received second billing! (See A Conversation on Designing the Future)
Today, my repertory is limited to only one character, the geek, Dan Reed; I’d like to think it is my best role. I channel all my acting dreams into invited talks on the endlessly fascinating world of high-performance computing; it is as close as I will get to performance art.
The academic world has neither greasepaint, stage lights, nor curtain calls, and comedy is even more rare – though I have tried to enliven my technical presentations with it from time to time. Instead, I take my comfort from technical presentations and the written word. (See My Balm in Gilead)
Grover’s Corners: Our Shared Home
Each of us lives in Grover’s Corners, regardless of geography or circumstance, such is the enduring relevance of Our Town. Caught in the sturm und drang of everyday life, seeking and striving, and consumed by our own concerns, we are all too often oblivious to basic and enduring truths that define our humanity. As the dreams and ambitions of youth yield to the wisdom and regrets of age, insight peeks through the clouds, illuminating enduring truths – the laughter of a child, the smile of a mother; the helping hand; and the good deed no one observes.
As Thoreau wisely noted, “Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.” These are the truths articulated by Our Town’s Stage Manager, the ones the saints and poets sometimes glimpse. It is also a lesson Blanche DuBois never mastered, one Willy Loman learned too late, and a dream Walter Young fought to realize.
Grover’s Corners lives on, in memory and in the heart, a reflection of our shared humanity. It is, after all, our town.
A wonderful post. Truly appreciated. Thanks.
Posted by: Clifton Sanders | February 26, 2025 at 03:59 PM