Wally, the Webb’s youngest child, dies after his appendix bursts while on a Boy scout camping trip.ĭr. In Act II, she marries George Gibbs after realizing that his opinion means more to her than anyone else’s. Webb’s dour demeanor contrasts with her beautiful garden of sunflowers and her maternal devotion.Įmily, the brightest girl in Grover’s Corners, dreams of living an extraordinary life. Webb is the publisher and editor of the town newspaper, the Grover’s Corners Sentinel. Always descriptive, sometimes didactic, often funny, he begins the play on May 7, 1901, and ends it twelve years later in the summer of 1913. The Stage Manager is the play’s narrator, who both directs the play and addresses the audience. Widely produced abroad, this Pulitzer Prize-winning play is not only an American classic but a classic of world literature.In Emily's final epiphany-wisdom she has learned through suffering-we seem to hear Thornton Wilder's voice speak to us: "Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you." Major Characters The first New York performance occurred soon thereafter-a now-famous production at the Henry Miller Theatre directed by Jed Harris. On January 22, 1938, the first performance of Our Town took place at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey. No scenery.” The costumes are simple the lighting instructions, complex. The play’s opening stage directions are clear and radical, especially for 1938: “No curtain. He tells the audience that the play will show “people a thousand years from now” that “this is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.” The three acts mostly follow two characters, Emily Webb and George Gibbs, who go to school together in Act I, marry in Act II, and experience tragedy in Act III. While he sometimes talks directly to the actors, he maintains his distance most of his lines are delivered as an address to the audience.
The audience encounters Grover’s Corners through the point of view of the Stage Manager-a character in the play who functions as the narrator and a sympathetic director. Wilder wanted the play to show “the life of a village against the life of the stars,” he said in an early preface to the book, and to explore “the trivial details of human life in reference to a vast perspective of time, of social history and of religious ideas.” The townspeople know many pleasures: seeing the sun rise over the mountain, noticing the birds, watching for the change of seasons.
Thornton Wilder’s stage drama Our Town (1938) takes place between 19 in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, a community that has not produced anyone very “remarkable” (p. “The morning star always gets wonderful bright the minute before it has to go,-doesn’t it?”-the Stage Manager in Our Town (p.
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