Our Town by Thornton Wilder

Every January I like to re-read the play Our Town.

I know, I know Our Town has a terrible reputation. Every high school has performed this play with often pathetic results. Please try to sweep those memories away and let me convince you to read, really read this play.

I believe it is some of the best writing out there – strong words you say, well stick with me here…

First published in 1938, it delivers a hauntingly real look at life….and death….and love. It takes place in Grover’s Corners a small New England town, actually based on a real town called Peterborough where Wilder often spent his summers and near where I lived in New Hampshire.

The three acts of this play are structured in a manner that encompasses the most basic features of human life: everyday living, love/marriage, and of course death. Much attention is usually paid to the third act of the play because it is here Wilder really closes in to make his point most obviously.

Yes, the third act is brilliant, and still chokes me up every time, but I like to linger in the first two acts – which are about the ordinariness of life — and it’s the ordinary that actually makes life extraordinary — just as it is. Mr. Wilder gently pushes this point, all life, any life, is special –and perhaps most of all, sharing this amazing life with others around you.

These subtle life observations give even greater rewards as one gets older, when time has passed and life has slapped you around – the words suddenly become heart achingly real and relevant.

Reading this little play always snaps me out of my post holiday blues (thus, why I re-read it in January) as I once again realize that what Mr. Wilder is urging – what we should, but seldom (or never) actually do.

I chuckled this time at this quote ~~ “We don’t have time to look at one another” ~~ if that was true in 1937, imagine how much more true it is today.

You may agree with the many critics who have charged Our Town with being overly sentimental and perhaps it is, but I don’t consider this a negative — we should be sentimental about the things we love.

Now, if I have you convinced to give it a try once again –every library has a copy and it’s very short.

Here are my favorite underlined passages:

Wherever you come near the human race there’s layers and layers of nonsense.

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.

Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners… Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking… and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths…and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

Yes, now you know. Now you know! That’s what it was 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.

Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and don’t even want to.

Read Our Town and perhaps it will remind what a gift it is to be alive and you must, must pay attention — to everything.

NB: Our Town was recently recommended by Ann Patchett as good background for her new novel Tom Lake, which I haven’t read, but is getting great reviews. Many recommend the audio version narrated by Meryl Streep. I don’t get along very well with audio books, but that sounds like it might be worth a try.