Our Town

Even though I read Thornton Wilder's Our Town sixty years ago, I remembered enough of the play to suspect that when I saw its revival at the Barrow Street Theater a week ago Sunday, I would cry during the third act. I was right. But remembering what was going to happen in the third act made me cry during the second as well. These weren't wrenching sobs, mind you, simply tears trickling down my cheeks. I'll bet it was the older members of the audience, like me, who were the most moved.

As all the world knows, or at least once knew, the play takes place in the fictional small town of Grover's Corners, near New Hampshire's Monadnock Mountain, in the early years of the twentieth century. In the first act, the Stage Manager introduces us to the town, pointing out its landmarks and some of its citizens. In the second act, we see the childhood friendship between George Gibbs and Emily Webb blossom into love and marriage. And in the third, we watch the ghost of Emily, who has died in childbirth, revisit her twelfth birthday, after having been warned by other spirits not to do so.

The Barrow Street Theater is very small, its maximum audience only 150 people. We sat along three sides of a tiny stage, and the actors walked and sat among us. This intimate exposure to the actors - the Stage Manager sat right next to me during much of the third act - created an extraordinary audience involvement in this drama of everyday lives.

For most of the play, the stage set is minimal, with only two tables and some chairs, and only a few props, such as school books, a baseball, and a baseball mitt. The actors wear ordinary modern clothes, for the most part informal duds, except during the wedding in the second act, and the actors pretend to handle solid objects such as plates, pots and pans, and ice cream sodas, although these are in fact invisible. But the scene in which Emily revisits her family on the morning of her twelfth birthday, is realistically staged, with authentic props and period costumes. We could even smell the bacon that Emily's mother was frying. This is a departure from Wilder's directions to use hardly any sets, but the innovation is highly effective. It was a bit like the shocking transition in the film version of the Wizard of Oz, from the Kansas of black and white to the Oz of color. Suddenly, ordinary life, the life that Emily longs to see again, becomes maximally vivid.

One of the play's messages is that ordinary life is precious, but that we don't usually appreciate it. When Emily's ghost returns to the graveyard, she asks the Stage Manager, Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute? He replies, No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some. The spirit of Simon Stimson, a church organist and the town drunk, who committed suicide, tells her, That's what it was like to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know - that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.

I left the theater so dazed that when I entered the subway I took the wrong train. But wrapped up in the play as I was, I didn't care. A few hours later, my wife, who had been spending the last eight days in Germany, called from the taxi that was bringing her home from the airport. I started to cry all over again, I was so happy to hear her voice. It reminded me of the way I used to feel, after my father died, when I dreamed that he really wasn't dead after all. In those dreams I would feel intense joy at seeing him again. Of course I would have been happy to hear her voice again even if I hadn't seen the play a few hours before, but the play intensified my appreciation of just how precious she is to me.

I used to tell myself, when standing in a long line or performing some routine task, that if I were dead and an angel gave me the chance to experience life again for just ten minutes, with those minutes randomly assigned, I'd be thrilled even to find myself standing in line, folding the laundry, or washing the dishes. After seeing Our Town, I made up my mind to value, as much as I could, all aspects of everyday life, from tying my shoes in the morning to glimpsing the moon at night, from eating breakfast with my wife to saying kiddush on Friday night. Perhaps the Stage Manager is right - that this can be done some of the time, maybe, only by saints and poets. I'm neither, yet I will do the best I can.