Not much is needed to tell the story of life except a bare stage with a few wooden tables and chairs. Just the people are enough.
Written by Thornton Wilder, Our Town takes place in the small town of Grover’s Corner, New Hampshire. The story and lives of people in Grover’s Corner is narrated by the “Stage Manager.” The play primarily follows the Gibbs and Webb families, with minute spotlights on the other townspeople over the course of thirteen years from 1901 to 1913. For this play, about celebrating the smaller things in life, Wilder won a Pulitzer Prize in Drama.
Act One: Daily Life, as it suggests, follows the regular and rather mundane lives of the Gibbs and Webb families. The youngest daughter of the Webb Family, Emily Webb (senior Eleanor Chung Putaski), and the eldest Gibbs family’s son, George Gibbs (junior Rowan Moore) head to school. Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb (seniors Madeline Kim and Grace Medrano) chat about their day while shelling peas. Dr. Gibbs (junior William Hanna) reads his daily newspaper.
Throughout Act One, the play introduces the entire Town. That includes Mrs. Soames, the town’s gossip woman, Constable Warren, the local milkman Howie Newsome (juniors Lucille Brooks, Desmond Rubenstein and Murray Goff) and many more.
The play was exceptionally visually simple. The stage setup consisted of no more than 25 chairs, two tables and a tall ladder. However, the set told the story just fine: two round tables and two benches adjacent to one another represented the Gibbs and Webb households. Props were entirely excluded. The actors mimed their actions whether that be opening doors, eating, reading newspapers and shelling peas.
Act Two: Love and Marriage follows the sweet romance of Emily Webb and George Gibbs. In Act One, 17 year olds George and Emily were clearly crushing on each other. Three years later, in Act Two, Emily and George are preparing for their wedding day. Aside from the main message, the play comments on married life for women. At George and Emily’s wedding, Mrs. Webb cries and says, “There’s something downright cruel about sending our girls out into marriage this way. I went into it blind as a bat myself.”
The seemingly all-knowing Stage Manager (senior Coda Wilson) was objective as a narrator, but not unkind. Between scenes, the stage manager offered insights about the town and all of its citizens. Wilson lingered around the other actors, portraying the Stage Manager’s always-present state. For example, during George and Emily’s meet-cute, he watched from atop a ladder in silence.
Act Three: Death and Eternity opens in a graveyard represented by the dead townspeople seated in rows. A clear divide was shown between the living and the dead, with the dead resting on the left side of the stage and the living mourning on the right. Act Three is about Emily’s death, nine years after her marriage. Emily wanders around her burial as a ghost dressed in pure white, as pure as her personality, pleading her living family to see her and bombarding the ghosts resting beside her with questions about death. One of the questions being “can I go back?”
Putaski’s portrayal of a desperate Emily wanting to live again could be felt from the back of the Huss Auditorium. To the shock of many audience members, Putaski cried in her character.
It was a somber ending to Our Town, full of grief. The entire cast reentered the stage to sing Dolly Parton’s “Light of a Clear Blue Morning.”
“Y’know — Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about ’em is the names of the kings and some…contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper— same as here,” the Stage Manager said at the end of Act One. “So — people a thousand years from now —,” though it’s only 86 years for today’s audience, “This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.”
Our Town showed on Nov. 22 and 23.
