Emotions and Eternity in Thornton Wilder's Our Town

Introduction: Three Levels of Our Town

Thornton Wilder's iconic play Our Town works on several different levels, and understanding these levels is critical to understanding the point of the play. On one level, Our Town is the story of the people in a town and the changes they undergo over time. On a second level, it is the story of a town and how it changes because of shifts in its inhabitants. On a third level, Our Town is the story of the changes — or at least the perceived changes — in American society over the course of the time period the play covers. When one looks at all three of these levels, it becomes clear that the graveyard scene, in which the Stage Manager delivers an extended soliloquy to the audience, speaks not only of the death of human beings, but also of the death of ideals and how that type of transformation takes place.

While this scene is powerful in most renditions of Our Town, it becomes even more powerful in the film version, where the iconic Stage Manager character is played by Paul Newman, himself an icon of American film and theater. The juxtaposition of that iconic actor with that iconic character highlights the message of Act III: that all things die, but that something eternal survives even the most tragic of deaths. This truth holds whether the death refers to the death of a loved one such as Emily, the death of a town such as the slow dying the audience witnesses of Grover's Corners, or the death of an era — specifically, the idealized America portrayed at the beginning of the play.

Sparse Staging and the Theme of Eternity

The plot of Our Town is essentially uncomplicated, which actually set it apart from much American theater of its time, which frequently featured convoluted plots with significant intrigue. This sparse plot is reinforced by the staging instructions, which call for minimal props and sets. What is most fascinating about the film version is that it strives to capture the feeling of the play rather than elaborate upon it. The film does not feature elaborate sets or subplots; instead, it is as close to a filmed version of the stage production as one could imagine. For an audience accustomed to elaborate sets, props, and special effects, this sparseness might seem distracting, especially since film adaptations of plays are generally expected to have more visual spectacle than their stage counterparts.

Other filmed versions of Our Town have featured more elaborate scenery, just as some stage directors have chosen to forgo the original staging instructions and provide the play with more physical production. The decision in this film to preserve the play's sparseness relates directly to the Stage Manager's opening soliloquy in Act III. That speech addresses the idea of eternity and implicitly dismisses the notion that physical things can be eternal. How could a director make this idea more vivid than by staging a production in which physical things are nearly absent? Props are missing, but the story is eternal. Even this production choice, therefore, is pivotal to the telling of the story.

Plot Overview: Acts I and II

The story opens in May 1901 in Grover's Corners, a New Hampshire town, though it could take place almost anywhere in the United States at that time, provided the inhabitants were primarily white. The play begins with the routine events of the day: the milkman and paperboy making their deliveries, a doctor delivering babies, housewives making breakfast, and children going off to school. It is meant to be a picture of everyday life in America, and the characters enact this everyday life in typical fashion. The Stage Manager, who functions as an omniscient narrator, can pull people out of their everyday routines — asking certain townspeople to step forward and speak directly to the audience, even answering questions from actors posed as audience members. In the midst of this daily routine, the audience meets George Gibbs and Emily Webb, next-door neighbors who have a crush on each other. George and Emily represent themselves, but they also represent the idea of American youth: neighbors who fall in love, having spent their entire lives side by side.

The next act opens on George and Emily's wedding day, but the scene contains a flashback to the couple's last year of high school. George has become a local star through his baseball playing and his election as class president, and Emily accuses him of becoming stuck up. This confrontation leads them to confess their affection for one another, and George decides to remain in Grover's Corners rather than going away to school. The flashback ends and the characters are married, drawing the audience into the ceremony as though they were guests.

This scene is notable because it dramatizes conflict within growth. George has attained a measure of fame and promise through his achievements, but Emily resists the change in him that those accolades have produced. She is able to convince him to resist that change as well, and he foregoes the future he had planned in order to stay and marry her. In one sense, George's decision to remain seems to forestall the town's dying. But in another sense, by staying and declining the broader world, George has only delayed his own withdrawal from the vitality of life.

Act III: Death, the Cemetery, and the Stage Manager's Soliloquy

Act III begins roughly a decade after George and Emily have married, placing the young couple in their late twenties. Instead of a happy home full of children and the promise of a long life together, Emily has died in childbirth, leaving George widowed and stricken. The focus of Act III is not on the living inhabitants of the town but on the dead in the cemetery. The dead speak, though they do so with an almost clinical detachment from the affairs of the living. Emily, newly dead, has not yet achieved this detachment. She misses life and wants to return to it, convinced she can recapture the vitality she knew when she was alive.

The omniscient and seemingly omnipotent Stage Manager intervenes and allows Emily to go back into the past. She relives moments from her earlier life, essentially taking the audience back to the beginning of the story, when she was twelve years old, before her marriage to George. She observes the everyday events of life in the town and gains a renewed appreciation for them — most especially for the mundane actions her parents took to make her life better. Yet, while Emily can appreciate the living and the small details of their daily lives, she cannot rejoin them. She is relegated to the status of observer, which makes her profoundly unhappy. Rather than remain and watch, she chooses to return to the cemetery and join the dead, relinquishing her quest to reclaim life. George, still among the living, is seen grieving her loss with undiminished intensity.

It would be incorrect to label Act III as pessimistic, even though it focuses on Emily's physical death. The Stage Manager delivers a lengthy speech at the beginning of the act that sets the tone for everything that follows. He says:

"We all know that something is eternal. And it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and it ain't even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There's something way down deep that's eternal about every human being" (Wilder, p. 68).

Viewed in relation to that quotation, it is clear that Wilder is arguing that something about Emily lives on in the town — not Emily herself, but something connected to her. By having the Stage Manager offer to take her back to life and then demonstrating that Emily literally cannot return to the world of the living, Wilder makes plain that death does mean the end of something. Yet the play also shows a form of continued existence in the cemetery. Its inhabitants are not engaging with the world as the living do — they are clearly detached from events in Grover's Corners — but they have not simply ceased to exist. Emily has stopped operating on one plane of existence; she can no longer affect things occurring in real time in Grover's Corners. However, she continues to exist on another plane. The play closes with her watching the stars come out over the town, not with her simply vanishing into a closed box. That is a powerful statement about the possibility of something eternal in every human being.

The Stage Manager's speech also addresses the changes the town itself has undergone. He remarks that residents are no longer the trusting people they were at the beginning of the story — people are locking their doors at night, growing wary of one another, though no one in the town has actually been robbed yet. The spirit of the town has begun to change. Yet, even as people grow more guarded, they come together to support one another when Emily dies, suggesting that community bonds, however weakened, are not yet severed.

References

Naughton, James. (2003). Our Town. Line by Line Productions.

Wilder, Thornton. (1938). Our Town: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Coward McCann, Inc.