Premiered: Henry Miller’s Theatre, New York City, New York, February 4, 1938 Type: Full-length Play Award: Pulitzer Prize
First produced and published in 1938, this Pulitzer Prize–winning drama of life in the small village of Grover’s Corners has become an American classic and is Thornton Wilder’s most renowned and most frequently performed play.
Overview by Ashley Gallagher
Plot Summary
“No curtain. No scenery.” A minimalist theatrical style sets apart the 1938 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town . Wilder’s greatest and best-known work as a playwright, Our Town opens with the Stage Manager’s introduction to Grover’s Corners, a fictional town based on Peterborough, New Hampshire where Wilder often spent his summers. The sparse and symbolic qualities of the set suggest Wilder’s intention to make Grover’s Corners represent all towns. 1 The Stage Manager, played by Wilder himself for two weeks in the 1938 Broadway production, breaks the fourth wall by directly addressing the audience. The Stage Manager also assumes control over the onstage action through such unconventional, metatheatrical devices as prompting actors and cueing scene changes. Once the actors have been set in motion by the Stage Manager in Act I, entitled, “Daily Life,” the allegorical world of Grover’s Corners unfolds. The audience is introduced to the Gibbs and Webb families who symbolize “ordinary people who make the human race seem worth preserving and represent the universality of human existence.” 2 Wilder explores the families’ inter-relationships, specifically between George Gibbs and Emily Webb. The audience watches George and Emily talk through their second story bedroom windows, represented by ladders: their simple actions complemented by the simple set. Act II, “Love and Marriage,” takes place three years later on George and Emily’s wedding day. After listening to Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs talk about their own wedding day, the Stage Manager transports the audience back to the days of George and Emily’s high school courtship. In this scene, Emily expresses her disdain for George’s conceited behavior. To make amends, George buys Emily an ice cream soda presented in an imaginary glass by Mr. Morgan, played by the Stage Manager. As this glimpse into George and Emily’s past comes to an end, George decides not to go to agriculture school so he can remain in Grover’s Corners, close to Emily. Then, the audience again finds itself at George and Emily’s wedding. The Stage Manager, now playing a minister, focuses the audience’s attention on the tearful and anxious families before George and Emily blissfully run up the aisle, ending Act II. In Act III, Wilder focuses on the end of the life cycle. Nine more years have gone by and Emily has died in childbirth. As the funeral procession crosses the stage, Emily, dressed in white, emerges from behind the mourners’ umbrellas and sits next to the deceased Mrs. Gibbs in the graveyard. Emily begins to question what it means to live and die, and, although warned against it, chooses to relive her twelfth birthday. Deeply saddened by everything she failed to notice while alive, Emily asks the Stage Manager to take her back to her grave but hesitates a moment to say good-by to the world. As Emily accepts her death, George falls at her feet in grief. While watching George, Emily asks Mrs. Gibbs, “They don’t understand, do they?” to which Mrs. Gibbs responds, “No, dear. They don’t understand.” 3 As Emily settles in with the dead of Grover’s Corners, the Stage Manager bids the audience a good night.
Critical Analysis
Thornton Wilder’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning play made its debut at Princeton, New Jersey’s McCarter Theater before ultimately moving to the Henry Miller Theatre in New York City. In the New York Times review, Brooks Atkinson called Our Town “one of the finest achievements of the current stage…a hauntingly beautiful play.” 4 Despite the myriad of interpretations of Our Town , most critics agree that the play is a microcosm of the life cycle. As Haberman writes, “[Wilder] is reminding the audience of how precious daily life is, because it determines our true reality…our enduring identity is not derived from the things and the events because they are familiar and repeated, but from our ever-new, ever-fresh relation to them.” 5 Wilder also demonstrates that these aspects of daily life and their constant renewal are universal to all generations and cultures. While Act I covers “Daily Life,” Act II explores “Love and Marriage.” Once the audience is transported back to George and Emily’s wedding day, they hear various characters’ opinions about marriage, which compels them to make their own judgment and promotes the idea that while marriage may be another part of daily life, “each marriage is different from all the others, and no definition could satisfy everybody.” 6 Our Town ’s emphasis on the universality of daily life, conscious audience engagement, and minimalist theatrical style are a few of the signature techniques which have qualified Wilder’s work both at home and abroad as the “most representative and significant product of the modern American theater.” 7 Our Town has been praised by scholars, such as Rex Burbank, for its simplicity and tragic vision. 8 While some audience members did not find the visual simplicity of the set compelling, “Wilder’s purpose in using the bare stage was, in part, to set his audience free from the meaningless particularity of the box-set.” 9 Since the play’s tremendous success in New York, Our Town has become a popular play in schools and community theaters primarily because of its minimal scenery requirements. Yet as Our Town ’s popularity has grown, so have the number of gross misinterpretations of it. Most often these productions are overly sentimental and romanticized, thus undermining Wilder’s philosophical themes and Burbank’s tragic vision reading. A “debate” on Our Town ’s classification as a tragedy occurred between Arthur Ballet and George Stephens. In 1956 Ballet nominated Our Town as “the great American drama.” Ballet pointed out the Stage Manager’s likeness to a Greek chorus as well as death acting as “the fear-agent employed as catharsis.” 10 In response, Stephens denied Our Town its tragic status and instead labeled it as “gentle nostalgia or, to put it another way, sentimental romanticism.” 11 As if anticipating Stephens’ objection, Ballet concluded his argument with his own definition of tragedy: “Tragedy, in its finest sense,… should point the way to a higher level of understanding of man as a creature revolving in the cosmos.” In this Aristotelian vein, perhaps the most tragic event in Our Town is George collapsing in front of Emily’s headstone, signifying “the most universal lament of them all: that we, our loved ones, everything living, dies.” 12 It is in these final moments of Our Town , whether they are classified as tragic or sentimental, that the audience may catch a glimpse of the profound understanding and respect Wilder had for life.
1 Haberman, 66. 2 Bryer, 110. 3 Wilder, 208. 4 Atkinson, Brooks. “Our Town.” The New York Times 5 February 1938, late ed. 5 Haberman, Donald. Our Town: An American Play. Boston: Twayne, 1989, 74. 6 Haberman, 59. 7 Corrigan, Robert. The Modern Theatre . New York: MacMillan, 1964. 8 Burbank, Rex. Thornton Wilder . New York: Twayne, 1961. 9 Haberman, 22. 10 Ballet, 247. 11 Stephens, 262. 12 Konkle, 135.
Bibliography
Almeida, Diane. “Four Saints in Our Town : A Comparative Analysis of Works by Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder.” Journal of American Drama and Theatre . 9.3. (1997 Fall): 1-23.
Ballet, Arthur H. “In Our Living and in Our Dying.” English Journal. 45. May 1956: 243-49.
Brown, John Mason. “Wilder: ‘Our Town.’” Saturday Review of Literature . 32. (1949): 33-34.
Cardullo, Bert. “Whose Town?” Notes on Contemporary Literature . 26.4. (1996 Sept): 3-5.
Cardullo, Bert. “Whose Town Is It, Anyway? A Reconsideration of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town .” CLA Journal . 42.1. 1998 Sept: 71-86.
D’Ambrosio, Michael A. “Is ‘Our Town’ Really Our Town?” English Record . 22.1. (1971): 20-22.
Galle, Jeffery. “Pedagogical Strategies for Teaching Our Town to a Crowd of Huck Finns.” Louisiana English Journal: New Series . 4.2. 1997: 72-75.
Hoberman, J. “Our Town.” Sight and Sound . 14.2. (2004 Feb): 24-27.
Londraville, Richard. “ Our Town : An American Noh of the Ghosts.” Blank, Martin (ed.), Brunauer, Dalma Hunyadi (ed.), Izzo, David Garrett (ed.). Thornton Wilder: New Essays . West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill, 1999. 365-78.
McClanahan, Rebecca. “Our Towns.” Gettysburg Review . 16.2. 2003 Summer: 217-32.
Scott, Winfield Townley. “ Our Town and the Golden Veil.” Virginia Quarterly Review 29 (1953): 103-17.
Shen, Min. “‘Quite a Moon!’: The Archetypal Feminine in Our Town .” American Drama . 16.2. 2007 Summer: 1-14.
Stephens, George D. “ Our Town —Great American Tragedy?” Modern Drama . 1. 1959: 258-64.
Toten Beard, DeAnna. “ Our Town and Modernism: Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein, and The Making of Americans.” Texas Theatre Journal . 2.1. 2006 Jan: 21-31.
Turner, Jeff. “No Curtain. No Scenery: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and the Politics of Whiteness.” Theatre Symposium: A Journal of the Southeastern Theatre Conference . 9. 2001: 107-15.
For further discussions of Our Town , please visit the Bibliography .
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Thornton Wilder
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The stage manager arranges some tables and chairs on stage while the audience enters the theater, and then addresses the audience. He tells them that they are about to see a play called “Our Town” about the town of Grover’s Corners. He introduces the audience to Dr. Gibbs and Mrs. Gibbs , as well as their neighbor, Mr. Webb , who edits the local newspaper, The Grover’s Corners Sentinel . The stage manager reveals that Dr. Gibbs died in 1930, and his wife died much earlier. It is early in the morning, and Dr. Gibbs is returning home after helping with the birth of a pair of twins. Mrs. Gibbs begins to make breakfast while in the Webb household Mrs. Webb does the same. Dr. Gibbs runs into Joe Crowell , a young boy who delivers the newspaper. The stage manager informs the audience that Joe graduated at the top of his class from high school and earned a scholarship to MIT. He had a promising career as an engineer, but joined the army in World War I and died in France. Howie Newsome , the local milkman, delivers milk to the Gibbs and Webbs. The two families’ children come down to breakfast: George and Rebecca Gibbs , and Emily and Wally Webb . The kids run off to school, and Mrs. Gibbs talks to Mrs. Webb. She tells Mrs. Webb that someone offered her $350 for an old piece of furniture in her home. She says she would consider selling it if she knew that Dr. Gibbs would spend the money on a vacation, and tells Mrs. Webb that she’s always wanted to see Paris. Dr. Gibbs, however, has no interest in traveling beyond visiting Civil War battle sites every two years.
The stage manager interrupts the women’s conversation and announces that he wants to give the audience more information about Grover’s Corners. He invites Professor Willard , a professor from the local state university, onto the stage to tell the audience about the town. He then invites Mr. Webb forward to give the “political and social report” on Grover’s Corners. Mr. Webb fields questions from three members of the audience, one of whom asks him if there is much culture in the town. Mr. Webb answers that there is not much. The stage manager says it is time to return to the play and announces that it is now the early afternoon. George and Emily return home from school and George asks her to help him with his homework (Emily is very intelligent and does well in school). The stage manager addresses the audience again to tell them about a new development in town. A new bank building is being built and the townspeople are burying various items in a time capsule with the cornerstone of the building. The townspeople are including copies of the New York Times and Grover’s Corners Sentinel , as well as of the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, and the works of Shakespeare. The stage manager decides to include a copy of Our Town , as well.
It is now evening and a church choir is practicing singing “ Blessed Be the Tie That Binds ” for a wedding. At the Gibbs home, Dr. Gibbs speaks with George about doing the chores around the house and asks him what his ambitions are for after high school. George wants to go work on his uncle’s farm and eventually take it over from him. Mrs. Gibbs, Mrs. Webb, and Mrs. Soames return from choir practice and gossip about the alcoholic choir director, Simon Stimson . The women go their separate ways and Mrs. Gibbs returns home. She tries to talk to her husband about him taking a significant break from work at some point, but Dr. Gibbs refuses. They both lament how Grover’s Corners is becoming “citified” because people are starting to lock their doors at night. Upstairs in the Gibbs’ house, Rebecca tells George about a letter her friend received that had the address, “Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God.” The stage manager announces the end of act one.
The stage manager announces at the beginning of act two that three years have passed. Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb make breakfast in their respective kitchens, and Howie Newsome delivers milk, as before. Joe Cromwell’s younger brother Si now delivers the town newspaper . It is gradually revealed that Emily and George are getting married. In their kitchen, Dr. Gibbs and Mrs. Gibbs recall their own wedding and how nervous they both were. George goes over to the Webb home, but Mrs. Webb tells him he cannot see Emily on their wedding morning. She goes upstairs to keep Emily from coming down, and Mr. Webb and George talk. Mr. Webb shares some marriage advice from his father, about making sure that the husband is the boss in the relationship and orders around the wife. But Mr. Webb says he has done the exact opposite and has had a happy marriage.
The stage manager interrupts the play to flashback to when George and Emily’s romantic relationship started. It is the end of George’s junior year in high school, and after school one day George and Emily are talking. Emily confesses to George that she is not pleased with how he has been acting recently and says that girls at school think he is conceited. George thanks Emily for being honest with him and the two have ice cream sodas at the local drugstore. George discusses his plans for the future, and after admitting that he has feelings for Emily (and learning that she feels similarly), he decides not to go to agricultural college, but rather to stay in Grover’s Corners with Emily.
The stage manager returns to the wedding day, where he performs the ceremony as the minister. Both Emily and George are nervous about the wedding and panic at the last minute, both anxious about leaving behind their childhoods and growing up. The two realize their love for each other, though, and are happily married by the stage manager, who then announces that the second act is over.
As the third act begins, the stage manager announces that nine years have passed since act two. Mrs. Gibbs, Simon Stimson, Mrs. Soames, and Wally Webb are standing in the cemetery, all deceased. Joe Stoddard , the town undertaker, talks with Sam Craig , who grew up in Grover’s Corners and has returned for the funeral of his cousin, who turns out to be Emily Webb, who died in childbirth. George, Dr. Gibbs, and Mr. and Mrs. Webb gather for the funeral, at which “ Blessed Be the Tie That Binds ” is sung. Emily enters and joins the other deceased characters. She asks if she can go back and relive her past life. Mrs. Gibbs tells her she can, but she and the stage manager try to dissuade her from doing so, because it is so painful.
Disregarding their warnings, Emily decides to relive the day of her twelfth birthday, and the stage manager takes her back to that day. She is amazed to see the town as it used to be and to see her parents look so young. But, she is also pained by knowing what will happen in the future (including the premature death of Wally). Ultimately, the pain is too much and Emily asks to be taken back to the cemetery. There, she and the other deceased souls agree that the living don’t “realize life while they live it” and don’t value their everyday lives as much as they should. George walks into the cemetery and kneels before Emily’s grave, grieving. The stage manager tells the audience that most of the citizens of Grover’s Corners are now going to sleep and they should get some rest, too, as the stars do “their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky.” He draws a curtain across the stage, ending the play.
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78 pages • 2 hours read
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Act Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Discussion Questions
How does Wilder’s choice to make the play metatheatrical illustrate and solidify the idea of ordinariness and universality found in the play?
The passage of time brings countless changes, yet things seem to remain the same. How does Our Town exhibit the cycle of life, love, and death that continues throughout human history?
What does the Stage Manager mean when he says, “There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being” (88), and why is this statement significant to the play?
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by Thornton Wilder
Our town study guide.
Our Town is one of the most performed and best-known plays in American theater; it is a truism in the theater business that every night, somewhere in America, a theater audience is watching Our Town . The play is especially popular in amateur productions, put on by schools or community groups. In fact, in the first two years that amateur companies were legally allowed to perform the play, Our Town was produced eight hundred times(Tappan Wilder, 2003). Because the play is so inexpensive to stage-after all, it famously calls for "no costumes, no scenery"-and so popular with audiences, it has become a standby of sorts for theater hobbyists who simply want to put on a show. Accordingly, many people first encounter Our Town in one of two ways: either by seeing it in an often mediocre school or community theater production, or by reading the play in high school English class as an accessible example of "experimental" theater. But Our Town , when looked at seriously and with sensitivity, is greater than its reputation might suggest.
Thornton Wilder began writing Our Town in 1936, splitting its composition between a stint at the MacDowell writing colony and a stay in Europe. Unlike most first-time playwrights, Wilder did not have to worry about pitching his play or struggling to get it produced - he was already famous for the novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey , and the famous director and producer Jed Harris had already asked for the rights to Wilder's first theatrical script, whatever it happened to be. A famous anecdote attends Harris' role in getting the play finished: Wilder returned from Europe in 1937 without having finished the play and with rehearsals due to start in only a few weeks; Harris virtually imprisoned the writer in a Long Island house until the acting script was complete. (One contemporary headline read: "Wilder Locked Up Till He Finishes That Play of His.")
The first performance - which took place on January 1938 in Princeton, New Jersey - drew scathingly negative reviews. The show business magazine Variety contended, "It will probably go down as the season's most extravagant waste of fine talent." Harris attempted to "fix" the play with a two-week run in Boston; poor attendance and unenthusiastic reviews ensured that the Boston run only lasted a single week. And more forebodings clouded the play prior to its official opening: for instance, Harris's partner, distraught over her failure to receive a role in the play, committed suicide. Despite these setbacks, Harris brought the play to New York, where he secured popular character actor Frank Craven to play the Stage Manager .
New York audiences are not Boston audiences, and Our Town 's Broadway opening was a resounding success. "Almost everybody's got some reservations against it (including myself)," wrote Wilder in a letter to a friend out of town, "but everybody's discussing it and going to see it." The notices themselves were initially mixed, with some critics seeing a beautiful, heartbreaking elegy and others a chintzy, sentimental stunt. But the man that really mattered, Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, called the play "hauntingly beautiful," "a fragment of the immortal truth," and all subsequent reviews fell in line with Atkinson.
Things started to go well for Our Town - its success was helped by Wilder winning the Pulitzer Prize four months into the run. In addition, Wilder rejuvenated the production when attendance began to slacken by performing the role of the Stage Manager for two sold-out weeks. After ten months on Broadway, Harris closed Our Town for a national tour that ended prematurely in financial conflict; but a few months later Our Town began its second - more influential - life on the amateur stage when Samuel French released the play's stock rights.
Besides uncountable non-professional productions around the world, there have been four Broadway revivals of Our Town , most recently starring Spalding Gray in 1988 and Paul Newman in 2002. Several adaptations for radio and television have also appeared through the years, along with a 1940 Hollywood film (in which, typical for Hollywood, Emily was allowed to live). Wilder went on to write several more commercially successful plays, including The Skin of Our Teeth and The Matchmaker , the latter of which was musicalized as Hello, Dolly! , but he is now remembered primarily for Our Town . Like a handful of other American masterpieces - Huckleberry Finn , Walden - Our Town is typically force-fed to ninth or tenth graders. However, the play is perhaps best appreciated well later, in middle age, when its autumnal character rings truer.
Our Town Questions and Answers
The Question and Answer section for Our Town is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.
Match these -.-
1) "They'll have a lot of troubles, I suppose, but that's none of our business.
Everybody has a right to their own troubles." Doctor Gibbs
3) George, I was thinking the other night of some advice my father gave me when I got...
What type of behavior does the Stage Manager describe as “layers and layers of nonsense”?
stfu you stupid bean. I can tell your from mexico
What does Bessie’s reluctance to change her route reveal about the daily routine of the residents of Grover’s Corners?
It represents the lack of change in their society: the comfort they find in the familiar and the routine. These routines are part of their identity.
Study Guide for Our Town
Our Town study guide contains a biography of Thornton Wilder, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.
- About Our Town
- Our Town Summary
- Character List
Essays for Our Town
Our Town essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Our Town by Thornton Wilder.
- Hymns and Music as Markers in Time and Part of Rituals
- An Essential Foundation: The Role Setting Plays in American Theatre
- The Importance of Our Town's Narrator
- Medicine in the Early 1900's: Essential Context for Emily's Death
- A Mundane Story to a Life-Changing Experience: The Act-by-Act Insights of Our Town
Lesson Plan for Our Town
- About the Author
- Study Objectives
- Common Core Standards
- Introduction to Our Town
- Relationship to Other Books
- Bringing in Technology
- Notes to the Teacher
- Related Links
- Our Town Bibliography
Wikipedia Entries for Our Town
- Introduction
- Composition
Home / Essay Samples / Life / Town / Analysis Of The Main Themes In The Play Our Town
Analysis Of The Main Themes In The Play Our Town
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