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Our Town
by: Thorton Wilder

“You’ve got to love life to have life, and
you’ve got to have life to love life…It’s
what they call a vicious cycle.”
- Stage Manager

Thornton Niven Wilder (1897-1975)

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1897: Born 17 April, in Madison, Wisconsin
1906-11: 7 May, arrives in British crown colony of Hong Kong where his father is Consul General. Attends school there for six months. Attends China Inland Mission School, Chefoo.
1912: Attends Thatcher School at Ojai valley in California and acts in school plays.
1913-15: Transfers to Berkeley High School; begins writing three minute plays.
1915: Sent by father to Oberlin College in Ohio, continues writing.
1917-20: Enters Yale in New Haven, Connecticut; wins Bradford Brinton Award for his four act drama, The Trumpet Shall Sound; leaves Yale to serve in the U.S. Coast Guard Artillery Corps. Returns to Yale. Receives his B.A.; sails for Europe.
1920-21: Resides at the American Academy in Rome where he becomes involved in archeological studies.
1921-22: Returns to U.S. Teaches at the Lawrenceville School for boys in New Jersey.
1925-26: Attends Princeton University in New Jersey and receives a master’s degree in French literature. The Trumpet Shall Sound opens in December of 1926 at the American Laboratory Theatre.
1927: The Bridge of San Luis Rey is published in November; becomes a best seller.
1928: Receives a Pulitzer Prize for The Bridge of San Luis Rey; remains at Lawrenceville. The Angel That Troubled the Waters is published.
1929: Begins construction of “House the Bridge Built” in Hamden, Connecticut.
1930: The Woman of Andros is published. Accepts position at the University of Chicago
teaching writing and classics in translation.
1931: The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays is published.
1932-33: Translates André Obey’s Le Viol de Lucrèce as Lucrèce, which is produced at the Belasco Theatre, December 30, 1932 and published in 1933.
1934: Meets Gertrude Stein in Chicago. She becomes a close friend.
1935: His first “American” novel, Heaven’s My Destination, is published.
1936: Father dies. Wilder leaves Chicago “to be a Writer.” Visits Stein in France and Freud in Austria.
1937: Wilder’s adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House opens on Broadway.
1938: Our Town opens at Princeton, moves to Boston, and then to Broadway. It receives the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The Merchant of Yonkers opens on Broadway; closes after only five weeks.
1939: Filming of Our Town by Sol Lesser begins.
1942: In Hollywood, collaborates with Alfred Hitchcock on screenplay for Shadow of a Doubt. Commissioned as a captain in the Army Air Corps Intelligence in 1942; serves until 1945. The Skin of Our Teeth opens in New York in November.
1943: Receives the Pulitzer Prize for The Skin of Our Teeth.
1946: Mother dies.
1947: Receives Litt.D. from Yale.
1948: The Ides of March is published; begins The Emporium, which he never finishes. Translates Jean-Paul Sartre’s Morts sans sepulture. It’s produced in Greenwich Village as The Victors.
1950-51: Receives LL.D. from Harvard. Awarded honorary doctorates by Harvard and Northwestern, 1951.
1952: Receives Gold Medal for fiction from American Institute of Arts and Letters.
1955: The Matchmaker, a revision of The Merchant of Yonkers, is successfully produced on Broadway.
1957: Awarded German Book Sellers’ Peace Prize.
1962: Plays for Bleecker Street are performed at Circle Square in New York. Wilder retreats to Arizona, to write.
1963: Begins work on The Eighth Day. Awarded Medal of Freedom by President John Kennedy who is assassinated before it can be presented.
1964: Hello, Dolly!, adapted by Michael Stewart from The Matchmaker, with music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, opens on Broadway 16 January and becomes a hit.
1965: Receives the National Book Committee’s Medal for Literature at the White House.
1967: The Eighth Day published; it wins the National Book Award for fiction.
1973: Theophilus North published; best-seller for twenty-one weeks
1975: Dies 7 December at the “House the Bridge Built” in Hamden, Connecticut
1988: 50th anniversary revival of Our Town opens at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre and wins Tony for best revival

Cast of Characters

Stage Manager – narrator, also plays Mrs. Forrest, Mr. Morgan and the Minister
Dr. Frank Gibbs – Grover’s Corners physician, father of George and Rebecca
Joe Crowell – paper delivery boy
Howie Newsome – milkman for Grover’s Corners
Mrs. Julia Gibbs – wife of Dr. Gibbs, mother of George and Rebecca
Mrs. Myrtle Webb – wife of Mr. Webb, mother of Wally and Emily
George Gibbs – eldest child of Mr. and Mrs. Gibbs, Rebecca’s brother
Rebecca Gibbs – younger child of Mr. and Mrs. Gibbs, George’s sister
Wally Webb – younger child of Mr. and Mrs. Webb, Emily’s brother
Emily Webb – eldest child of Mr. and Mrs. Webb, Wally’s sister
Professor Willard – geology professor from the state university
Mr. Charles Webb – Editor of the Grover’s Corners Sentinel, husband of Mrs. Webb, father of Wally and Emily
Simon Stimson – Choir director and organist of the Congregational Church
Mrs. Louella Soames – Member of community, friend of Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb
Constable Warren – Grover’s Corners keeper of the peace
Si Crowell – paper delivery boy in Act II, Joe Crowell’s younger brother
Sam Craig – funeral attendee, Emily’s cousin
Jolene Stoddard – undertaker of Grover’s Corners
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Experimental & Minimal Set Design

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Thornton Wilder on Our Town

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        “(Our Town) is an attempt at complete immersion into everything about a New Hampshire
village which, I hope, is gradually felt by the audience to be an allegorical representation of all
life.”
        “Our Town evades every possible requirement of the legitimate stage. It is pure description,
entirely devoid of anything even resembling conflict, expectation or action, which are usually
considered the component parts of any play.”
        “At first glance, (Our Town) appears to be practically a genre study of a village in New
Hampshire. On second glance, it appears to be a meditation about the difficulty of, as the play
says, ‘realizing life while you live it.’ But buried back in the text, from the very commencement
of the play, is a constant repetition of the words ‘hundreds,’ ‘thousands,’ ‘millions.’ It’s as though the audience – no one has ever mentioned this to me, though – is looking at that town at ever greater distances through a telescope. I’d like to cite some examples of this. Soon after the play begins, the Stage Manager calls upon the professor from the geology department of the state university, who says how many million years old the ground is they’re on. And the Stage Manager talks about putting some objects and reading matter into the cornerstone of a new bank and covering it with a preservative so that it can be read a thousand years from now. Or as a minister presiding at the wedding, the Stage Manager muses to himself about all the marriages
that have ever taken place – ‘millions of ‘em, millions of ‘em…who set out to live two by two…’ Finally, among the seated dead, one of the dead says, ‘My son was a sailor and used to sit on the porch. And he says the light from that star took millions of years to arrive.’ There is still more of
this. So that when finally the heartbreak of Emily’s unsuccessful return to life again occurs, it is against the background of the almost frightening range of these things.”
        “Our Town is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village: or as a speculation about the conditions of life after death (that element I merely took from Dante’s Purgatory). It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life. I have made the claim as preposterous as possible, for I have set the village against the largest dimensions of time and place. The recurrent words in the play (few have noticed it) are ‘hundreds,’ ‘thousands,’ and ‘millions.’ Emily’s joys and griefs, her algebra lessons and her birthday and her birthday present what are they when we consider all the billions of girls who have lived, who are living and who will live? Each individual’s assertion to an absolute reality can only be inner, very inner. And here the method of staging finds its justification- in the first two acts there are at least a few chairs and tables; but when Emily revisits the earth and the kitchen to which she descended on her twelfth birthday, the very chairs and tables are gone. Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mindnot
in things, not in ‘scenery.’…The climax of this play needs only five square feet of boarding and the passion to know what life means to us.”
        “When you emphasize place in the theatre, you drag down and limit and harness time to it. You thrust the action back into past time, whereas it is precisely the glory of the stage that it is always ‘now’ there.”

Voss, Nanette. "Our Town: A Classroom Study Guide." Ferndale-rep.org. Ferndale Repetory Theatre. Web. 15 Dec. 2011. <http://www.ferndale-
        rep.org/study-guides/Our_Town.pdf
>.

Major Themes

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1. People should appreciate life while they are living it.
2. Carpe Diem: Seize the Day
3. The Little things in life are really the big things.
4. No town can isolate itself from the rest of the world.
5. No community is perfect, even idyllic Grover's Corners. 


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