Our Town, Program Notes

Thornton Wilder on Our Town:

“Our Town is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village; or as a speculation about the conditions of life after death (that element I merely took from Dante’s Purgatory). It is an attempt to find value above all price for the smallest events of our daily life.  I have made the claim as preposterous as possible, for I have set the village against the largest dimensions of time and place.  The recurrent words in this play (few have noticed it) are ‘hundreds’, ‘thousands’, ‘millions’.  Emily’s joys and griefs, her algebra lessons and her birthday presents---what are they when we consider all the billions of girls who have lived, who are living and will live? Each individual’s assertion to an absolute reality can only be inner, very inner.”

Although born in Wisconsin, Thorton Wilder spent his formative years in California and China.  With this background and a great interest in classical Greek, Japanese and contemporary European drama, he turned to a style of theatre he hoped would capture reality, rather than verisimilitude.  He followed Moliere’s theory that “only a couple of boards, and one or two passions are needed for drama.”

Wilder believed that theatre could and should awaken not superficial sentiments, but deep inner truths, what he called “the recollection within us”.  He wrote Our Town during the gloom of the Great Depression and the preparations for war in Europe.

When the play was finished a preliminary performance was presented in Princeton, New Jersey, on January 22, 1938, where it was warmly received.  It moved to Boston, and was scheduled to run two weeks. Reviews were mixed (One critic dismissed it as a “stunt”) and performances for the second week were cancelled. Theatre lore has it that the Broadway opening was in jeopardy  until the critic Brooks Atkinson traveled to Boston for a performance and guaranteed a good review in the New York Times.  Even so the play was booked into the Henry Miller Theater, which was only available for two weeks.

Edith Oliver, the late revered theatre critic at the New Yorker, wrote in 1988 that she happened to attend the opening of Our Town on February 4, 1938 because a friend of hers was playing one of the baseball players:

“The evening was so overwhelming that I don’t even remember the final curtain; I came to at about 4am near a newsstand in Times Square waiting with a couple of actors in the company, for the review in the Trib.  I knew then—still do—that Our Town was the best modern play I had seen or would see.”

Reviews were ecstatic.  Two weeks later the play moved to a long commercial run at the Morosco Theater, and Wilder won his second Pulitzer Prize.