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Once upon a time in America—
- There was no March Madness—and, in some quarters, year round, not much madness at all.
- There were no AR-15 rifles with bump-stock or slide-fire modifications, and high-capacity clips.
- There were no ATMs, or debit cards, let alone cryptocurrencies.
- There were no revving 0-to-60 mph mega-horsepower vehicles with thudding 120-decibel surround-sound.
- There was no Bumble, Tumblr, or Tinder; no swipe left or right; no Bachelor or Bachelorette hot-tub frolics and frothings, followed by hold-your-breath edge-of-your-seat big-audience eliminations.
There was, ostensibly, a different kind of reality, an actual kind of face time:
“… now that they’re bringing in these auto-mo-biles, the best thing to do is to just stay home. Why, I can remember when a dog could go to sleep all day in the middle of Main Street and nothing come along to disturb him.”
That’s the May 1904 Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire traffic report—delivered by the Stage Manager in the second act of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. It’s one of the play’s several non-rude awakenings.
Innocence
The wistful assessment of Main Street canine-traffic-congestion is delivered by the Stage Manager who has temporarily assumed the role of the soda-fountain-clerk, who, in mime, makes strawberry ice-cream sodas for the high-school sweethearts. The boy has just carried the girl’s books, which are held together by a strap, as was the fashion back then.
If there is a rating more modest than PG, that scene would earn it. There is something fitting and genuine, and appealing, about teenagers being naturally restrained and respectful.
But that, was then.
Contentment
For the young boy’s father, the town doctor, a trip to the battlefields of the Civil War, every two years, is “enough treat for anybody.” His wife explains that “traipsin’ about Europe might make him discontented with Grover’s Corners”—where chickens roam his yard. The good doctor’s prescription for contentment: “better leave well enough alone.”
For the young girl’s mother, the treat in her life was to see the Atlantic Ocean.
The girl’s father, the publisher and editor of the Grover’s Corners Sentinel, explains that the town is “a little better behaved than most” and “probably a lot duller.”
He notes that “likker ain’t a regular thing in the home here, except in the medicine chest. Right good for snake bite y’know—always was.”
In Grover’s Corners, there’s not what most people would think of as “culture” and “love of beauty.” Still, the publisher-editor does want the audience to know that “we’ve got a lot of pleasures of a kind here: we like the sun comin’ up over the mountain in the morning, and we all notice a good deal about the birds. We pay a lot of attention to them. And we watch the change of the seasons; yes, everybody knows about them.”
Without pretentiousness, without priggishness, he feels the need to report on aspects of the town’s literary and artistic values: There’s Robinson Crusoe, The Bible, Handel’s Largo, hymns, choir practice, and Whistler’s Mother. But, he cautions, “those are just about as far as we go.”
These people do not boast or brag.
Late afternoons, horses doze at hitching posts and husbands return from work to push their own lawn-mowers. Kids play outside, after they’ve done their chores. The day “runs down like a tired clock.”
Except for the doctor, who makes house calls, there are no late nights. Before retiring, a long-married mother and father might take a moment to “smell the heliotrope in the moonlight.”
The demographics of this “very ordinary town” are telling: The vast majority of the town’s young people—even those who’ve been away to college—“settle down right here to live.”
But that, was then.
A vocabulary of kind expression
A mother somehow finds time to wash and iron a blue gingham dress for her fourteen-year-old daughter to wear to school that morning. Without melodrama, the girl moans that the dress makes her look like “a sick turkey.” With a kind and understanding smile, her mother replies, “Oh, hush- up-with-you.”
The Stage Manager tells us that in 1904, upon passing “their last high-school examinations in solid geometry and Cicero’s Orations,” the graduates “suddenly feel themselves fit to be married.”
We are assured that this is most fitting and natural, in that we are meant to go “two-by-two.”
The women cook three meals a day, for twenty, thirty, forty years—without a Summer vacation. They bring up children, do the wash, clean the house—and never suffer a nervous breakdown. They vote “indirectly.”
On the eve of her son’s wedding, the mother of the groom can’t sleep—“I heard a lot of the hours struck off.”
A year before, hesitatingly and demurely, the girl who would become the bride had opened the boy-girl dialogue with a gently-delivered critique of the future groom’s then-current preoccupation with baseball and his sandlot buddies: “I’m sorry if it hurts your feelings, but I’ve got to—tell the truth and shame the devil.”
Her candor registers favorably. Her critique has her seventeen-year-old would-be-suitor realize that the girl who has been in his awkward (chaste) thoughts “likes him enough to be interested in his character.”
In all earnestness—genuine earnestness—the young baseball talent (would-be-suitor) thanks her and resolves to be more mindful of others’ feelings—especially hers.
No major-league pretentions for him, no notions about playing baseball for money, no away-from-home agriculture college, either. Following high-school graduation, hard-on-the-heels of his baseball sneakers, he’ll immediately go to work on his uncle’s farm: His field of dreams.
But that, was then.
The windy hilltop of Act Three
A narration of small-town New England life from 1901 to 1913, Our Town is a period piece. There is none of the societal and political disarray, discord, disenchantment, and dysfunction that take center stage in modern times.
And yet, there are regrets—timeless ones—that are discussed looking down on cemetery plots decorated by nature with mountain laurel and lilacs. Plots that reside under “lots of sky, lots of clouds—often lots of sun and moon and stars.”
We are given a view of life, after life as we know it. And we are given to believe that we rarely appreciate and embrace the lives we are fortunate enough to live.
We are told that there is an eternal—beyond our ambitions and sufferings, even beyond our pleasures and loves. This final act prompts us to think about what might be “eternal.”
The continuing worldwide reach of the depiction of a New Hampshire village, 1901 to 1913
The Wilder Family LLC informs us that Our Town “is performed at least once a day somewhere in the world—and, in recent years, it has had over 430 licenses per year.”
We also learn that the play “was an international theatrical event from the first—produced throughout the world, beginning in 1938.” Productions are currently running worldwide—most notably in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, Croatia, Mexico, Ukraine, Spain, and the Czech Republic.
An extended run, in eighty years of life
Is Our Town eternal? Hard to understand how the folks in Grover’s Corners “trampled on the feelings of others.” Hard to believe that they dealt with friends and neighbors unfeelingly—that they were “at the mercy” of their own “self-centered passions.”
But that, was then.
Critical and Complimentary Reception
Did the play provide an authentically representative show of the realities of small-town life in America from 1901 to 1913?
Reviewers seemed to think that the ordinariness related in Acts I and II captured the time and the place.
Premier in Princeton
A column in the January 20, 1938 Princeton Packet previewed the play’s January 22nd one-night-only debut performance at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre—explaining that Wilder’s New Hampshire Summer tutoring stints and later arts-colony-residencies, along with long walks and talks with locals, provided the sense of time and place “woven” into the play.
In a pre-debut interview, Wilder spoke about capturing “the independence, understatement, homeliness” of such a village, “in the best sense.”
That Princeton Packet preview acclaimed the conveying of “the sights, sounds, even smells of that daily life… which through its very humbleness and commonness, has a kind of universality and divinity.”
A January 14, 1938 preview published in The Princeton Herald closed noting that the interwoven comments by the Stage Manager and other authorities place that particular village life “against a wide perspective of time and social history.”
Debut in Boston
In its February 26, 1938 edition, the Boston Evening Transcript declared that the “curious” play “is written with sympathy and feeling… it compels attention.”
In its February 26, 1938 edition, the Boston Globe noted that “During his years of work at the MacDowell Colony in Peterboro, N. H., Thornton Wilder must have absorbed the knowledge of small-town New Hampshire folk that he has so ingeniously crammed into Our Town. He has recorded his impressions with evident savor of New England character in a fantasy that dips gently into comedy and sentiment, and turns at the end into a comforting species of allegory.”
Defying Conventional Drama-Critic Expectations:
Nothing happens, but in the calm, quiet, and gentleness, everything is eventful.
In its February 5, 1938 review, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle called the play “a cozy little thing, covering the life of man.”
“No play at all” was the kind verdict, rather, “as plain as the brief biblican scenes that were done by workmen, villagers and church-folk when the drama was getting born in the years back beyond the Middle Ages. It is simply a series of illustrations of how human beings live, love, marry, and die.” The depiction of life, from cradle to grave, was characterized as “more like a reverie than a play.”
“Nothing in the least exciting happens—no fights, no fires, no murder or passion, nothing but the everyday things in their small-town way….Nothing happens that one expects to see happen on the stage, but everything is eventful.”
The Stage Manager’s gentle explications come from his fondness. The play’s “calm and quiet make it a novelty in the theater…Probably a majority of theatergoers are in so great a hurry to see life that they will be impatient with Our Town, on the ground that it slows them up. They shouldn’t. It’s really very fine.”
In a February 13, 1938 follow-up, the drama critic for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, decided to elaborate: “There is no struggle of contending forces, as such forces are usually defined. There is no villain, hero or heroine; there are no driving passions. This is a picture of life as it is lived by certain inhabitants of a quiet little town where nothing in particular happens.” For all that “nothingness,” the critic concluded that the play has “a great and simple beauty in it.”
In his March 13, 1938 follow-up, the drama critic for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle went on to explain that Our Town has “no plot. None of the things customarily expected to happen in plays happens in this.” Wilder’s reflections are said to amount to “a reverie.” The saving grace: The simplest “armchair reflections” are delivered “affectionately” so that, the critic opined, even those disappointed theatergoers will find the reverie memorable: “In its gentle way, Our Town makes a deep impression.”
Simplicity and Truth
In his New York Times review of February 5, 1938, Brooks Atkinson was effusive: “a beautifully evocative play.” He found that the simple events of a placid New Hampshire town “have been transmuted into a universal reverie.” He celebrated Wilder for giving “familiar facts a deeply moving, philosophical perspective.”
Atkinson characterized the depiction as “a microcosm”—a “haunting” one. “The scale is so large that the voices are never lifted. But under the leisurely monotone of the production, there is a fragment of the immortal truth.”
Too folksy? too mundane?
In its February 5, 1938 review, the New York Daily News critic told readers that Our Town was “a poet’s conception of what a drama should be: a view not closed in by stage hands’ flats and props —a view of what people want and do and pitiably fail to realize.”
The critic elaborated: “It is a poet’s conception; but in the eyes of this regretful reporter it is not quite a poet’s achievement. Sometimes, as it skips through the lives in a small New Hampshire town, it soars; but again it is earthbound by its folksy attention to humdrum detail. However it may add up, it is an intelligent and rewarding theatrical experiment.”
A longing for the uncontentious, undramatic?
In her April 1938 Partisan Review Theater Chronicle, Mary McCarthy described the play as “dear” and “essential lyric, not dramatic.” In her view, “the tragic velocity of life, the elusive nature of experience, which can never be stopped or truly felt at any given point, are themes of the play—themes familiar enough in lyric poetry, but never met, except incidentally, in drama.”
She described the Stage Manager as “an indulgent defense attorney” for his village (in contrast to a drama’s prosecuting attorney). In her view, what is enacted on the stage merely illustrates the information the Stage Manager and other authorities communicate directly to the audience.
Though crediting Wilder with proceeding “honorably,” McCarthy was not favorably impressed with the play’s matter-of-factness: “a deficiency of imagination, not an error of taste.”
For all her intellectually-profound criticism, and despite her resistance to credit the play’s appeal to an audience’s imagination, McCarthy seemed to recognize one of the play’s virtues: The third act delivers something quite thought-provoking: “The tragedy of life lies in the fragmentary and imperfect awareness of the living.”
The “tragic velocity of life”
Whether “a cozy little thing” or “an armchair reflection” or “a reverie” or a minor lyric poet’s tugging at heartstrings, Our Town has endured.
If Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize play continues to have currency, it may be as a vehicle that serves to give us pause. That kind of pause may arrest some angst, prompt us to slow down so as to reflect on our personal expressways and routes—and, perhaps, pullover to enjoy life’s scenic overlooks that would otherwise be overlooked.
Our Town’s first two acts tell of a simpler time and place, through the daily lives of truly-caring and utterly-decent people. The message of the play’s third act is that life in Grover’s Corners—as good as it is—was not as appreciated and prized as it should have been; was not as well-lived and well-loved as it might have been.
But that was then—and probably is now.
