Our Town: A Play in Three Acts (Perennial Classics)
by Thornton Wilder

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Book Reviews of Our Town: A Play in Three Acts (Perennial Classics)

Book Review: Our Town: a return to where we never were
Summary: 5 Stars

The play was written in 1938. America was still in the Depression. and people longed for an escape. In the opinion of many film historians, black and white movie-making was at its peak, and its escapes were many. Viewers could see "poor" families who owned two-story houses and had servants; action-adventures heroes who survived cliff-hangers every Saturday; great romances filled with more passion than you could ever see anywhere else; and wartime explosions and gun battles which were still something to flock to on the big screen and avoid in real life. But "Our Town" was none of that. Like the Andy Hardy movie series that began before it and Archie who in comic books was to follow it, ironically in December 1941, it portrayed small town Americana. It was a return to the simple, safe, hometown America that many remembered and no one ever really lived in.

But "Our Town" was also very different. The "realism" that began on stage and then permeated the movie theaters after the experimental days of the pre-Depression wasn't there. The fourth wall had been created, and now was destroyed. Here was a Stage Manager who spoke directly to the audience, skipped through time, told us what had already happened when it would occur years after the scene we were watching, and even brought the dead back to life, at least for a moment.

The form was odd for its time (although in some ways not so different from the presentational, minimal set theatre of Shakespeare's days.) Had the subject matter been two strange people waiting for a no-show Godot, it might have died in obscurity, perhaps to be resurrected years later. But here were characters everyone knew or imagined they did, at least if they were fourth generation Caucasian. Everyone's mother was there, and father, and brother and sister, and milkman and newsboy and boyfriend and girlfriend and husband and wife. In fact, they could see themselves. The characters represented the past everyone imagined they had.

The limited suspension of disbelief required in the first two acts and oddly in the third act still made real one important message: it is the small things in life, the trivial, everyday things that are really important. Ironically, Wilder seemed to argue against his own thesis, showing in the third act how the dead would forget the trivialities and even major events of life and move on. But as we saw when one character relived and then couldn't stand to relive her 12th birthday, the important things in life are a mother's hug, milk delivered to your door, and "food and coffee--and new-ironed dresses and hot baths..." (Act III). As the poet and wise man Solomon said in the biblical book of "Ecclesiastes," power and great wealth are nothing but "vanity" and meaningless, and the important thing is to "eat, drink and be merry."

I believe the theme of the play is best stated in that same scene in Our Town, when the dead character in wonder proclaims, "oh earth, you're too wonderful for anyone to realize you" (ibid). Anyone except "saints and poets maybe" (ibid).

The theme is also reflected in one of the most famous lines spoken in one of the most famous movies of the very next year, the 1939 "Wizard of Oz." After Dorothy flew from her grey home to drop into a wonderful world of color, she returned to find her family, life and farm had really been colorful all along. She learned, and we all felt, that indeed "there's no place like home."

Summary of Our Town: A Play in Three Acts (Perennial Classics)

Classics Books

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• Drama > British & Irish
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