Our Town

Thornton Wilder, the playwright and novelist, was born April 17, 1897 in Madison, Wisconsin.  As his father was an American diplomat, he lived in China for some years during his childhood.  Wilder served in the U. S. Army during World War I.  Afterwards, he earned a Bachelor's Degree from Yale and a Master's Degree from Princeton.

On January 22, 1938 (79 years ago today), Wilder's play, "Our Town," was first performed at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey. It debuted on Broadway in New York City on February 4, 1938 at the Henry Miller Theater.  Our Town won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama that same year.  

Two years later, a movie version of Our Town was made starring William Holden, Beulah Bondi, and Thomas Mitchell.  In the 1950s, as a young boy, I remember watching it on TV and being very moved by it.  The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1940 but lost to Rebecca.

In November of 2002, a revival of Our Town opened on Broadway at the Booth Theater for a limited run.  The cast included Paul Newman, Jane Curtin, and Frank Converse.  One night I was in the audience.  As a middle-aged man, I was very moved by it again.  Newman was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. 

Our Town is a three-act play set in fictional Grover's Corners, New Hampshire between 1901 and 1913.  It is basically the story of two neighboring families who live there. The play is performed on an almost bare stage, with a stage manager acting as an intermediary between the other actors and the audience.

Act I presents the ordinary lives of the various characters that inhabit Grover's Corners.  Act II is all about the courtship and wedding of George Gibbs and Emily Webb, young people who have grown up next door to each other. Act III deals with the death of Emily while giving birth to their second child.

There are two conflicting themes in Our Town.  The first is that life is precious.  Even little things like eating breakfast with your family, reading the newspaper, noticing the sun coming up over the mountains in the morning, cutting your own lawn, throwing a ball up in the air, enjoying an ice cream soda, and looking at the moon at night can give life meaningful significance. However, because human beings don't know when their lives will end, there is a tendency to assume it will last indefinitely and thus not appreciate the beauty of seemingly mundane daily experiences.  In a similar way, we don't appreciate our health until we don't have it.    

The second theme is that life is fleeting.  As the stage manager says, "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."  However, for some, there is no long life that whizzes by.  In the play, Emily dies at a very young age, in her mid-twenties.  Nine years earlier, at her wedding, in a moment of trepidation, she asks her father, "Why can't I stay for a while just as I am?"  Life doesn't stand still; it flies.       

In Our Town, Wilder "ponders whether human beings truly appreciate the precious nature of a transient life." After her death, Emily is given a chance to relive her twelfth birthday, a seemingly, unimportant day in her life.  After a short time observing her family's behavior, she can't bear it any longer and returns to the cemetery.  "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it, every, every minute?"

One of the dead responds to Emily, "That's what it was to be alive.  To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another.  Now you know - that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to.  Ignorance and blindness."

Learning from Wilder, I try to appreciate what I have every day I have it.

As a postscript, I must point out that Wilder was one of three who were given credit for writing the screenplay for the movie version.  The ending of the movie is very different from the ending of the play, which is dark: the death of Emily.  In the movie, her death, her remembrance of her twelfth birthday, and the visits to the cemetery were dreams.  She survives childbirth.

This was part of a pattern in Hollywood during that period.  Movies needed to have positive endings.  A similar example is Grapes of Wrath.  In the John Steinbeck book (1939), the ending is very dark, while the John Ford movie (1940) ends on a hopeful note.