Our Town
Based on Wikipedia: Our Town
The Play That Stripped Everything Away
Imagine walking into a theater and finding almost nothing on stage. No painted backdrops of quaint New England houses. No carefully arranged furniture. No props for the actors to hold. Just a bare platform, some chairs, and a few ladders.
This is how Thornton Wilder wanted his 1938 play Our Town to be performed. And that radical emptiness is precisely what made it, in the words of playwright Edward Albee, "the greatest American play ever written."
The decision wasn't born of poverty or minimalism for its own sake. Wilder had a specific theory: when you remove the scenery, you force the audience to restage the play inside their own heads. The spectator becomes a collaborator. Their imagination fills the empty space with meaning that no set designer could ever match.
A Town That Exists Nowhere and Everywhere
The setting is Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, a fictional small town we follow across twelve years, from 1901 to 1913. The play gives us precise geographic coordinates: latitude 42 degrees 40 minutes north, longitude 70 degrees 37 minutes west. But here's a delicious detail that most audiences never discover—those coordinates actually place Grover's Corners about 300 meters offshore in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of Rockport, Massachusetts.
This geographic impossibility feels intentional. Grover's Corners is meant to be every American small town and no particular town at all. It's the town you grew up in, or the town your grandparents told stories about, or the town you imagine when someone says "simpler times."
The Stage Manager—our narrator, guide, and occasional actor—describes nearby New Hampshire landmarks like Mount Monadnock and the towns of Jaffrey, Peterborough, and Dublin. These are real places that Wilder knew intimately. He drafted portions of the play while staying at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, an artists' retreat that still operates today.
The Man Who Controlled Everything
The Stage Manager is one of the most unusual characters in American drama. He speaks directly to the audience, breaking what theater people call "the fourth wall"—that invisible barrier between performers and spectators. He tells us what year it is, who the townspeople are, and sometimes even what will happen to them in the future.
But he does more than narrate. Throughout the play, he steps into various roles: the minister who performs a wedding, the owner of a soda shop, an ordinary townsman. He's simultaneously inside and outside the story, omniscient yet grounded, supernatural yet folksy.
This technique has a name: metatheatre. It means theater that's aware of itself as theater. When the Stage Manager tells us to take an intermission and "go and smoke now, those that smoke," he's acknowledging that we're all participants in a shared illusion. The honesty is disarming.
Act One: The Daily Life We Never Notice
The first act unfolds on an ordinary May morning in 1901. Joe Crowell delivers newspapers. Howie Newsome brings the milk. (Howie's horse, Bessie, is described as visible to the characters but not to the audience—another layer of the play's games with reality and imagination.) Children head off to school. Breakfast is made and eaten.
Nothing happens.
That's the point.
We meet two neighboring families: the Gibbses and the Webbs. Doctor Frank Gibbs and his wife Julia have children named George and Rebecca. Newspaper editor Charles Webb and his wife Myrtle have children named Emily and Wally. The families live next door to each other in pleasant anonymity, the way neighbors in small towns have lived for centuries.
A professor lectures the audience about the town's history. The newspaper editor discusses its social and political makeup. The Stage Manager introduces us to Simon Stimson, the church organist and choir director, and here the play's surface calm ripples slightly. Simon drinks too much. Everyone knows it. The town's response is to look the other way—except for Mrs. Gibbs, who discusses Simon's troubles with her husband, showing genuine concern.
We never learn why Simon drinks. Wilder refuses to explain. Some critics have interpreted Simon as a closeted gay man in an era when such a life would have been impossibly painful, but the play leaves the question open. His suffering simply exists, witnessed but unexplained, like so much suffering in real communities.
Act One ends with young George Gibbs and Emily Webb gazing out their bedroom windows on a moonlit night, separately but somehow together, beginning to realize they might like each other. The Stage Manager dismisses us with characteristic directness.
Act Two: Love and Its Complications
Three years pass. The Stage Manager announces the themes explicitly: Act One was daily life, Act Two is love and marriage. Then he adds, with dark portent, "There's another act coming after this. I reckon you can guess what that's about."
George and Emily are getting married. It's raining. George visits his soon-to-be in-laws in an awkward, impulsive scene that captures the nervous energy of wedding mornings everywhere.
Then the Stage Manager does something extraordinary: he stops time and takes us backward one year, to a scene that explains how we got here. Emily confronts George about his pride. Over ice cream sodas, they discuss their futures. George decides to skip college and stay in Grover's Corners to become a farmer. They confess their love.
This chronological leap backward is jarring in the best way. Theater traditionally moves forward. By reversing time, Wilder reminds us that our present moments are built on countless past moments, that every wedding day contains within it all the days that led there.
Back in the present, both George and Emily have pre-wedding panic. George tells his mother he's not ready. Emily tells her father the same thing. Their parents calm them down. The wedding proceeds.
The Stage Manager officiates—another of his many roles—and delivers a meditation on marriage that's startling in its ambivalence. "People were made to live two by two," he says, but then adds: "I've married over two hundred couples in my day. Do I believe in it? I don't know."
That uncertainty cuts against every romantic comedy's happy ending. Marriage in Our Town is presented not as a fairy tale conclusion but as a profound mystery, a leap of faith that even an omniscient narrator can't fully endorse.
Act Three: The Thing We Cannot Face
Nine more years pass. The Stage Manager brings us to the cemetery on a hill outside town.
The dead sit in chairs arranged in rows, speaking occasionally but mostly just waiting. Mrs. Gibbs is there—she died of pneumonia while traveling. Young Wally Webb is there—his appendix burst on a Boy Scout camping trip. Mrs. Soames, the town gossip, is there. And Simon Stimson is there, having hanged himself.
"We all know something is eternal," the Stage Manager tells us. The dead are gradually losing interest in the world of the living, letting go of earthly concerns, waiting for something they sense is coming—"something important, and great."
A funeral procession approaches. Sam Craig, who left Grover's Corners years ago to seek his fortune in Buffalo, has returned to bury his cousin. That cousin is Emily Webb Gibbs, dead in childbirth at twenty-six, leaving behind a grieving husband and a newborn child.
Emily joins the dead, and here the play transforms into something unlike anything else in American theater.
The Return That Breaks Your Heart
Emily wants to go back. She wants to relive just one day of her life. Mrs. Gibbs, already further along in death's detachment, warns her against it. "Our life here is to forget all that, and think only of what's ahead," she says. Simon Stimson, bitter even in death, agrees. But Emily insists, and the Stage Manager—ever accommodating, ever watchful—allows her to return to her twelfth birthday.
What follows is devastating.
Emily watches her mother, young and alive, preparing breakfast. She sees her father come downstairs. She experiences the ordinary morning rituals of her childhood home. And she cannot bear it.
"It goes so fast," she cries. "We don't have time to look at one another."
The pain isn't in seeing loved ones who will die—everyone knows death is coming. The pain is in recognizing how little attention anyone paid to the moments when they were living. "All that was going on," Emily says, "and we never noticed."
She begs to return to the cemetery, to the strange peace of the dead. But before she goes, she delivers the play's most famous speech, a goodbye to the earth that sounds like a prayer and an accusation at once:
"Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you."
She asks the Stage Manager: "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?"
His answer is quiet: "No. The saints and poets, maybe. They do some."
Why a Bare Stage?
Now Wilder's staging choice makes sense. By the third act, even the few chairs and tables have been stripped away. Emily returns to a kitchen that isn't there, speaks to a mother who can't hear her, reaches for a life that exists only in memory and imagination.
"Our claim, our hope, our despair is in the mind—not in things, not in scenery," Wilder wrote. The French playwright Molière had said he needed only "a platform and a passion or two" to make theater. Wilder took that literally. By the play's climax, we need nothing but "five square feet of boarding and the passion to know what life means to us."
The emptiness of the stage mirrors the emptiness Emily discovers in human awareness. We sleepwalk through our days surrounded by miracles—the smell of coffee, the sound of a parent's voice, the particular quality of morning light—and we notice none of it until it's gone.
A Play Written Everywhere
Wilder composed Our Town in fragments across years of travel. He began making notes while teaching in Chicago in the 1930s. He worked on it at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. He's believed to have drafted the entire third act in a single day in Zürich, Switzerland, in September 1937, after taking a long evening walk in the rain with his friend Samuel Morris Steward, a writer who would later become famous under various pseudonyms.
The play premiered at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, on January 22, 1938. It moved to Boston three days later, then opened on Broadway in February at Henry Miller's Theatre. The production was directed by Jed Harris, a legendary Broadway producer known for his demanding personality and theatrical genius.
Our Town won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama that same year. It was Wilder's second Pulitzer—he'd won previously for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey—and it cemented his reputation as one of America's most important writers.
The Play That Was Too Sad for Russia
In 1946, something remarkable happened. The Soviet Union banned a production of Our Town in the Russian sector of occupied Berlin. The official reason? The play was "too depressing and could inspire a German suicide wave."
Think about that for a moment. A country that had just survived World War Two, that had lost more than twenty million citizens, that was administering a devastated Germany—this country thought a gentle play about a New Hampshire village was too emotionally intense for audiences to handle.
Perhaps the Soviets understood something about the play that optimistic American audiences sometimes miss. Our Town isn't comforting. It offers no afterlife of reunion and joy. The dead in Wilder's cemetery aren't waiting to embrace their loved ones—they're waiting to forget them. The play's message isn't that life is precious; it's that we're constitutionally incapable of understanding how precious life is until we've lost it.
The Neighbors and Their Fates
The play's secondary characters form a tapestry of small-town American life, each with their own quiet tragedy or comic touch.
Joe Crowell, the paperboy, earns a full scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduates at the top of his class. The Stage Manager mentions, almost casually, that Joe will die young on the battlefields of France in World War One. This is how Our Town handles death—not with melodrama but with the same matter-of-fact tone used to describe milk deliveries.
Rebecca Gibbs, George's younger sister, elopes with a traveling salesman and settles in Ohio. Mrs. Gibbs dies while visiting her there. Howie Newsome keeps delivering milk, year after year, a fixture of constancy in a changing world.
The Crowell brothers, Joe and his younger sibling Si, both hold marriage "in high disdain"—a comic counterpoint to the wedding that anchors Act Two. Mrs. Soames, who spends much of the play gossiping, dies and joins the dead on the hill, where she continues to watch the living with the same busy curiosity.
How to Ruin the Play
Wilder had strong opinions about how Our Town should be performed, and he was frequently disappointed by productions he saw. "It should be performed without sentimentality or ponderousness," he insisted, "simply, dryly, and sincerely."
Sentimentality is the great danger. It's easy to play Emily's return to her birthday as a tear-jerking melodrama, to wring maximum emotion from her goodbye to the earth. But Wilder wanted something cooler and stranger—the recognition of loss delivered not with sobs but with a kind of clear-eyed wonder.
Ponderousness is the other trap. The play deals with enormous themes: life, death, love, time, consciousness, meaning. A heavy-handed production can make those themes feel like homework. Wilder preferred lightness, the sense of ordinary people going about ordinary business while cosmic questions hover just at the edge of awareness.
What Wilder Was Really After
In explaining his intentions, Wilder was characteristically precise: "Our Town is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village or as a speculation about the condition of life after death."
Then what is it?
"It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our life."
He wanted to make the claim as "preposterous as possible," he said, so he set the village against "the largest dimension of time and place." The Stage Manager mentions millions of years of geological history, thousands of years of human settlement, hundreds of generations buried in the cemetery. Against that vastness, the daily rituals of breakfast and homework and conversation acquire a strange dignity.
Few audiences notice, Wilder observed, that the recurrent words in the play are "hundreds," "thousands," and "millions." The scale is cosmic, but the subject is intimate: how to be present for your own life.
The Miming That Creates Everything
Without props, actors in Our Town must mime every action. They shell imaginary peas, open invisible doors, drink from nonexistent glasses. In a famous scene, Emily and George talk through their bedroom windows—but there are no windows, just two actors standing on ladders to suggest the neighboring houses.
This technique forces a particular kind of attention. When an actor mimes making breakfast, you watch their hands more carefully than you would if they were holding real utensils. The absence makes you present. You're constructing the world alongside the performers.
It's also surprisingly moving. When Emily returns to her twelfth birthday and watches her mother in the kitchen, that kitchen doesn't exist even as theatrical illusion. The chairs and tables from earlier acts are gone. Emily is watching something that exists only in memory, portrayed by actors pretending to handle objects that aren't there, telling a story about a time that exists only in the past. The layers of absence pile up until presence itself becomes visible.
The Stage Manager's Final Word
The play ends quietly. Emily returns to her grave and sits beside Mrs. Gibbs. George Gibbs kneels weeping over her marker. Emily watches him "impassively"—already beginning the dead's slow forgetting of the living.
The Stage Manager steps forward one last time. He doesn't moralize. He doesn't explain. He simply wishes the audience goodnight and tells them it's time to go home.
That's it. No catharsis, no resolution. Just the reminder that it's late, that you have a life to return to, that tomorrow will come with its own newspapers and milk deliveries and unremarkable miracles.
Whether you notice them is up to you.
Why It Endures
Our Town remains one of the most frequently performed plays in America, a staple of high school drama departments and professional theaters alike. It's been revived on Broadway numerous times, always finding new audiences who respond to its strange combination of simplicity and depth.
Part of its durability is practical: you can perform it almost anywhere, with minimal resources. A school gymnasium or a community center can become a theater. The lack of set requirements is freeing rather than limiting.
But the deeper reason is the play's subject matter. Death comes for everyone—that's not news. But the specific form of grief that Our Town dramatizes, the mourning not just for lost loved ones but for lost attention, for all the moments we were present for but didn't inhabit—that hits differently in every era.
In our age of smartphones and constant distraction, the Stage Manager's question might be more urgent than ever: Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?
The saints and poets, maybe. They do some.
The rest of us have to keep trying.