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"Our Town" is one of the most well-known modern plays, and its setting, Grover's Corner, has become synomous with the every-town. Thorton was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and his first breakthrough was the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which won the Pulitzer in 1928 (Hamish). "Our Town" was written in 1938 and remains his most famous.

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The play goes to great lengths to descibe the mundane happenings of the townspeople, especially in the morning scenes, as everyone arises to work and go about their lives. And while these actions may seen inconsequential, they have immense meaning and power. The staging of the play, famously minimalist with few to no props, requires of the audience and of the players to make meaning, to see that buying food is as much an "event" important to one's life as getting married or raising children. The Stage Manager, an important, omnipotent character in the play, says of their lives, "Wherever you come near the human race there's layers and layers of nonsense" (80). Yet it is nonsense, that for a time being, means something to those who live it. The town might be falsefront, but it remains a powerful one.

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The structure of the play reflects the passage of time with each act beginning in the morning and ending in the evening, and each successive act the beginning, middle, and end of the lives of the people of Grover's Corner.

 

But the town is replete with the denial of time so many other towns are plagued with. Emily Webb, as she lay on the brink of death toward the end of the play says of her short life:

I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back — up the hill — to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by Grover's Corners...Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking...and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths...and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. ...Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? — Every, every minute? ...I'm ready to go back...I should have listened to you. That's all human beings are! Just blind people. (100-101)

And adds:

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. (101)

That ignorance of time sweeps over towns, despite towns being a regular symbol for the passage of time, of death and renewal. And at death the mundane gains new meaning because every element of living is imporant and is finished faster than one has time to revel in mundanity. This is also another contradiction of the town: it is a place which touts community but it is subject to "the mercy of one self-centered passion or another".

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Works Cited

 

Wilder, Thornton. Our Town: a play in three acts. New York: Harper & Row, 1957. Print.

 

Robertson, Hamish. "Biography." Thorton Wilder. The Thornton Wilder Family, n.d. Web. 5 May 2014. <http://www.thorntonwilder.com/about/biography.html>.

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Winesburg, Ohio                                                            The-College-on-the-Hill →

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