Our Town :: essays research papers

Our Town, by Thornton Wilder, is an American classic, expressing with warmth and humor the eternal truths of human existence. It is a heartening, compassionate glance of that time before the Great Wars before our innocence was lost forever. From the time of its first performances in 1938, it has continued to be regarded as one of the best representations of spirit in America and of the richness of our theatre world. For decades it has remained a landmark of theatrical craftsmanship and a loving picture of American life. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Our Town depicts shame set against a background of centuries of time, social history, and religious ideas. As the Stage Manager (who functions as a Greek chorus in the drama) says "This is the way we were in our growing-up and in our marrying and in our doctoring and in our living and in our dying." Our Town is set in 1901 in Grovers Corners, New Hampshire, where the Gibbses and the Webbs are neighbors. During their childhood George Gibbs and Emily Webb are playmates and their lives are inextricably woven together as neighbors lives are likely to be. But as they grow older they pass into a state of romantic (and embarrassing) interest in one another. George proposes to Emily in the drug store over an ice cream soda, and they are married with all the good folks of Grovers Corners in attendance. But George and Emilys ecstasy is short-lived. Emily dies in childbirth and is buried in the towns cemetery on a rainy, dreary day. There she is reunited with those friends and neighbors who have died before her, and who help her acclimate herself to her new existence. In one of the most vital scenes in modern theatre, the peace and quiet of death, which can never be understood by the living, is portrayed. Our Town is not still about Emily and George and, indeed, is not just about a small town in northern New England a hundred years ago. Our Town is a play about what we (and Thornton Wilder) thought America and Am ericans were. As we are about to take a head-long leap into the next century we are forced, not merely to look ahead to what we might become, but to turn and look back at what allowed us to arrive at this threshold of the new millennium.