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Anxiety

Wilder's Our Town Soothes an Anxious Nation

Why do we return to Our Town to relieve stresses and anxieties?

I have been writing fiction and nonfiction about small towns for over forty years. My most recent contribution to the genre was a blog I submitted for this site titled “Stereotyping Small Town America.” In the weeks that followed, I became more aware of the renewed interest many other Americans have in our nation’s small towns and rural areas.

Shortly after the blog was posted on March 15th of this year, New York Times columnists Paul Krugman and David Brooks published opinion pieces about small towns. Krugman’s article, “Getting Real About Rural America” (03/18/19), focused on the difficulty of reversing “the economic decline of rural America.” Brooks’ article, “What Rural America Has To Teach Us” (03/22/19), emphasized the “civic-mind-set” of rural Americans, whom he believes have a greater sense of commitment to their communities and the public good than their urban counterparts.

I will leave those arguments to others and turn instead to my own field, American literature, and another expert on small town America: Thornton Wilder, author of the stage play Our Town. Since it was first produced in 1938, Our Town has become one of the most performed plays in the history of American theater. Performances of the play seem to proliferate during times when Americans believe our country is in trouble, and they feel a need to reconnect with our nation’s roots. The first such performance was in the middle of the Great Depression when war drums were already beating in Europe.

I haven’t taken a nationwide census of whether the play has recently experienced another of its many revivals during troubled times. I can only say that within the past few months two performances of Our Town were scheduled at the university where I teach and another in nearby Escondido, California.

If Our Town is the play Americans escape to whenever our nation is experiencing difficult times, it is an interesting choice. It is hardly a sentimental play. To the contrary, some early audiences expecting an escape into a nostalgic and romanticized small town were greatly disappointed. Act III, which is set in the Grover’s Corners cemetery, features former residents of the small town who pontificate about how they and all other humans waste their lives. The characters first introduced in Acts I and II are now deceased. They wait patiently in a purgatorial state for a final answer to be revealed regarding the immortality of the human species. However, that answer does not seem to be forthcoming.

This is not the stuff that usually makes anyone feel uplifted or hopeful about life. Indeed, some earlier audiences cursed the actors and stormed out of the theaters. To some of those audiences, the final act emphasized the harsh, inevitable fate of all of us who walk on this small planet. The play offers no comfortable assurances, except perhaps the Stage Manager’s bland ruminations that there must be “something eternal.” Otherwise, there are no bromides to false hopes, no consolations for the rewards for having lived well, and no promise of eternal life as promised in various religions. Instead, those in the cemetery recognize that they have failed to live their own lives meaningfully and productively. So why is the play often seen today as a safe refuge in a dangerous, seemingly out of control world?

Perhaps Emily Webb articulates the reason for the play’s lasting power. In her closing monologue, when she has temporarily returned to Grover’s Corners after dying in childbirth, she suddenly realizes the preciousness of the gift of life. She exclaims with great passion, “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you.” Her speech was foreshadowed earlier when Rebecca Gibbs read an address on an envelope written by an eccentric minister. He had placed the planet Earth in the fullest context of a vast universe, where our home is reduced to the status of an insignificant speck of dust, except for one thing: it harbors the gift of life.

The “Our Town” in the play’s title thus transcends Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. The play celebrates family and community rituals that bring people together. Wilder repeats the words “we” and “our” throughout the play to emphasize the stronger sense of community ties that may exist in small towns. By Act III, Grover’s Corners sheds whatever provincial facade remains as the town symbolizes the entire human race and its search for the ultimate meaning to life on planet Earth—which Wilder presents as a very small planet in a very big universe.

So what do audiences today find in Wilder’s play that brings them back to Grover’s Corners during times of great stress and anxiety? It is easy to list the many problems from which they are trying to escape: poverty, permanent wars, devastating climate changes, a divided nation, political burnout—the list is quite long. But perhaps what the play is trying to tell us is that we should all try to view our lives as gifts. Perhaps then we would get our priorities in order.

Would that change the world for the better? Probably not. Wilder was too much the realist to expect wholesale changes in this flawed species called humanity. But his play is a wake-up call for all of us to think more deeply about our lives as we are actually living them, not after it is too late. Perhaps that is why audiences return to Our Town to relieve the stresses and anxieties of modern life, if only for a few moments before and after they walk out of the theater.

The play reminds us of the little things that make life meaningful, even in the middle of national and worldwide chaos and uncertainty. Perhaps for that reason anxious and disillusioned Americans continue to return to Our Town as a safe harbor in a troubled world.

Dennis M. Clausen
Performances of Our Town increase during troubled times.
Source: Dennis M. Clausen
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