Our Town (and Time Travel)

 I am a big Our Town fan.

Jeffrey Donavan (George) and Emily Skinner (Emily) in the White River Theatre Festival production, 1990, directed by Michael Friedman. All photos are from that production

And I know a lot of people who are not big Our Town fans. They find it simple. Perhaps they are not open to the metaphysical complexities of the play.

Wilder worked on this play for almost four years. The ease with which the play unfolds betrays none of the sweat and rewrites that went into it.

Wilder made his name as a writer, ten years earlier, with the 1927 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It’s set in 18th century Peru and is about a friar who tries to solve the mystery of why five people died in a freak accident when a rope bridge collapsed - and whether God had a hand in it or not. The novel intertwines five separate narratives.

So Wilder was no stranger to metaphysical subject matter and was certainly capable of writing a dense, complicated plot if he wanted to.

Thornton Wilder in 1948

I once asked a Polish director – who directs a particularly remarkable company – what he thought of American theatre. He said, “Your country has some extraordinary playwrights: William, O’Neill, Wilder.”  This stunned me. Not because they’re not great playwrights, but because it’s sometimes hard to have perspective of our own artistic culture, especially as seen from abroad. The playwrights he named are writers whose works resonate around the world. As opposed to the great Polish plays, which, inexplicably, don’t resonate here. We perform the Russian Chekhov. But Czech plays, Slowak plays, Polish plays? Have you ever heard any production here of a play by Witkacy, or Wispianski, or Slowacki? Those are three towering Polish playwrights. Janusz Glowacki’s Hunting Cockroaches performed off-Broadway at one time. Does anyone do that play?

This is not to say that all – or even most, or even more than a few – American plays travel well. One of Poland’s major theatres produced a very good production Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow in Polish and the artistic director told me that the production “bewildered” his audiences. 

Where was I going with this? Oh yes, Our Town is a magnificent play. And time travel. I wish I could go back in time and remove all of that digression. Perhaps an exploration of why plays do or do not resonate internationally is a worth kicking around in the future.

Our Town got mixed reviews when it premiered in 1938 – mostly positive, but still mixed. Edward Albee considered Our Town “the finest serious American play.” While Eleanor Roosevelt reputedly said that when she saw it, she “did not have a pleasant evening.”

Be that as it may, I saw a high school production of Our Town when I was 14 and it completely changed the way I look at the world. I say this, even though all of the acting was average, except for the 15-year-old who played Emily - and she was spectacular. It is a testament to the power of the play that it still can pack a wallop, even in a distinctly amateur production. In fact, such was its appeal to amateurs that in the two years after it premiered, 658 amateur groups across the country performed the play. That’s a lot of productions of Our Town.

The humor magazine National Lampoon recounted that Our Town was the only play ever performed at the fictitious C. Estes Kefauver High School. And it was performed yearly.

Tom Rooney as the Stage Manager

The plot is familiar to any who has every taken a high school drama class. In the first act we meet the folks who live in Grover’s Corners, NH, circa 1901, including the Gibbs and Webb families – and specifically their children George Gibbs and Emily Webb. In the second act it’s three years later and George and Emily are getting married. In the third act it’s nine years later and Emily has died. Eager to see her family again, her spirit goes back in time to relive her twelfth birthday. Finally, her spirit leaves the world, realizing that living people are blinded to the beauty and specialness of life.

Act I “Daily Life” George (Jeffrey Donovan) and Emily (Emily Skinner) becoming friends.

Act II “Love and Marriage” and Emily (Emily Skinner) and George (Jeffrey Donovan) at the wedding. Editor Webb (Michael Poisson) between them and the Preacher (Tom Rooney) in the background.

Act III “Death and Eternity” The Stage Manager (Tom Rooney) and “the dead” in the background.

That summary was just to remind those who know the show. If you’ve not seen or read it, it will not convey anything about the play.

In my first professional acting job, I was cast as George (at the age of 19) at the Summer Repertory Theatre at University of Missouri, Columbia.

I produced the play in 1990 and you can see the photos here. Although I’ve seen plenty productions of Our Town, producing it enabled me to experience the play night after night as a spectator. A wonderful experience.

Among its other virtues, this is the only play I know of which gives you the experience of going back in time. This is no small feat. And Our Town does it as fully as I can imagine. I am talking about the third act when Emily goes back to earth.

Emily in the foreground and the rest of “the dead” in the background.

 There are a lot of time travel movies. But none of them do what Wilder did, which is allow us to re-experience something that we thought was gone forever.

What Wilder did was different than a flashback, which is chiefly used to provide new information about the character’s backstory that is critical to the plot. There is no conventional plot in Our Town with the usual dramatic twists and turns. 

I define plot as the articulation of a question which keeps the audience watching. Will Hamlet avenge his father? Will John Proctor survive the witch hunt? Will Godot ever show up? There is no such question in Our Town and so we experience it as we experience our own lives. Just watching it unfold.

One of Wilder’s friends said at the time: “You broke very rule. There is no suspense, no relationship between the acts, no progress.” 

This is part of a peculiar power of the play. In Our Town we experience the life of the characters from childhood to adulthood. And then, unexpectedly we go back in time. Not only that, we go back in a way which erases the tragedies we experienced in the third act.

So when the play does allow us to do something that we can’t do in life, it’s an arresting one-of-a-kind experience. When Emily, suddenly back home at twelve years old and seeing her parents, says, “I can’t bear it, they’re so young and beautiful!” we feel it as she does. Because for the last two hours we have watched those characters age.

“EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?"
STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some.”

Also, something that is frequently lost in a discussion of Our Town is that Wilder was writing about the childhood of his audience when it premiered. His audience WERE children when George and Emily were children. When Wilder went back in time it was to the audience’s childhood as well. And so they experienced the play in 1938 in a much more personal way than we can ever do. Which is an extraordinary statement, given the depthless power of the play.

I was moved to write this because Methuen Drama published Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century by Howard Sherman in January, which is when I started this blog. It reminded me of all the productions of Our Town that I have seen, the one I was in, the one I produced, and that high school production that moved me so deeply. The book contains interviews with over 100 artists who worked in productions of the play and who reveal how Our Town has impacted them.

It certainly has impacted me.