This is the 80th Anniversary of this Pulitzer Prize winning American drama, written by one of the foremost dramatists of the 20th Century. "Our Town" has been described as "the greatest American play ever written." The story follows a fictional New Hampshire town called Grover's Corners through three acts: "Daily Life", "Love and Marriage", and "Death and Eternity." Narrated by a Stage Manager and performed with minimal props and sets, I selected this play for a variety of reasons.
Audiences will experience the timeless truth of life and death and the essence of our humanity, with its strengths and weaknesses all crafted through the powerful simplicity of two families at the turn of the 20th Century. Wilder wrote this play at a time when he was witnessing our American culture undergo a dramatic change from what many would have termed a simple "agrarian" society to an urban and industrialized world in the years immediately preceding the Second World War. He has a clear view that there is often much more truth to our lives than we often acknowledge, buried in each of our simplest moments, especially as it regards our families and community relationships. He saw that this new industrialized world was guilty of distracting us from the essence of our humanity.
This concept of how a society can be distracted from its own human "truths" is never more real than now as we face a pace and level of technological advancements that can be quite simply staggering. When Emily says the crushing line "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? -- every, every minute?", we can almost hear our own voices echoed in the Stage Managers' reply, "No." Thornton Wilder's daring approach to this deeply human drama has created an invaluable addition to the American Theatre. We hope you will be stirred, enlivened and ultimately hopeful that the possibility continues to exist in us each and every day to embrace life, share it with those most important to us and to not waste a moment.
