Our Town: A Play in Three Acts
(Perennial Classics) by Thornton
Wilder
Our Town
This beautiful new edition features an eye-opening Afterword written by
Tappan Wilder that includes Thornton Wilders unpublished notes and other
illuminating photographs and documentary material.
Our Town was first produced and published in 1938 to wide acclaim. This
Pulitzer Prize–winning drama of life in the small village of Grovers Corners,
an allegorical representation of all life, has become a classic. It is Thornton
Wilders most renowned and most frequently performed play.
Personal Review: Our Town: A Play in Three Acts (Perennial
Classics) by Thornton Wilder

By most accounts Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) considered himself a
teacher rather than a writer--a curious situation given than he won
numerous literary awards, including three Pulitzers. Among these prize-
winners was OUR TOWN, first staged in 1938. It is generally considered to
be the single most famous play written by an American author, and
Samuel French Inc., which holds the amateur performance rights, states
that it is performed at least once a day somewhere in the world, as popular
abroad as at home.
The play is perhaps most widely known for the way in which it is staged.
The stage is bare. A few chairs, stools, tables, and ladders are used to
indicate a kitchen, a bed room window, a soda fountain, a cemetery and
other locations; the actors mime use of imaginary glasses, plates, bowls,
satchels, and boxes.
The story is equally simple. The first act introduces us to the town,
Grover's Corners in New Hampshire, seen in the early years of the 20th
Century--and most particularly to the Gibbs and Webb families, who live
next door to each other. The second act finds boy-next-door George and
girl-next-door Emily marrying, and a flash-black shows the audience how
their romance began. It is a simple tale, full of details of small town life,
church choir on Wednesday night, milk delivered fresh each morning,
breakfast to be made, chickens to be fed--and slowly, as the action moves
forward, we are drawn into this simple way of life and its seemingly
endless and trivial repetitions.
Wilder swirls a number of themes throughout the work, themes that are
simple yet profound, details of the particular and the universal--and these
gather suddenly, unexpectedly in the third and final act, which comes as a
shock after the charming ease of the play. Emily has died in childbirth and
she takes her place in the cemetery among the dead, all of whom patiently
wait and watch for something which is not yet clear, the minutes passing
one by one into eternity, their memories of life fading into nothingness, a
portrait of darkness that is yet somehow still seeded with light. It is here
that Wilder makes his ultimate statement: who are you when you have
been shorn of all earthly details and devices? Where do you exist within
the mind of God?
Many non-theatre people find playscripts difficult to read, and in truth
playscripts are a blueprint for directors and actors and not intended as
reading material for the general public. This is preface to the very basic
statement that some plays "read" well and some do not--and that this is not
necessarily an indication of how the play actually performs. On the page,
OUR TOWN reads a bit flat; it seems a shade obvious, a shade ordinary.
On the stage, however, it easily one of the most delicately beautiful
constructs imaginable, a play which demonstrates the beauty and value of
each life--no matter how ordinary it may be. Remarkable stuff and strongly
recommended.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer
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