The Work
Our Town was first performed at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, on January 22, 1938, before moving to Broadway on February 4. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1938 and has been continuously in production since - it is estimated to receive more productions per year in the United States than any other play in the theatrical repertoire, making it the most-performed American drama of the twentieth century.
The play takes place in the fictional town of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, between 1901 and 1913. It has no scenery - actors use mime to suggest objects and locations - and is narrated by a Stage Manager who speaks directly to the audience, introduces characters, provides historical context, and controls the passage of time. The three acts cover Daily Life, Love and Marriage, and Death and Eternity. In Act Three, Emily Webb Gibbs dies in childbirth and is allowed to relive one day of her life, choosing her twelfth birthday. She returns to the living, watches the ordinary morning of her childhood with devastating clarity, and finds that the living are incapable of appreciating 'every, every minute.'
Biblical Engagement
Psalm 90:10 - 'The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away' - is the psalm of Moses on the transience of human life that the Stage Manager invokes obliquely throughout the play. The Stage Manager speaks about geological time, about the thousands of years human beings have lived and died, and sets the brief lives of the Gibbs and Webb families against this immensity. Psalm 90's meditation on the gap between divine eternity and human transience - 'For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night' - is the temporal frame within which the play's celebration of ordinary life acquires its poignancy.
1 Corinthians 13:12 - 'For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known' - is the Pauline eschatology that Act Three dramatizes. The dead in the cemetery see with the clarity that the living cannot; they have moved from the partial vision of life to something approaching full knowledge. Emily's return to her twelfth birthday is an experience of seeing through a glass, not darkly, but with the clarity of death - and what she sees is that the living do not see at all, cannot appreciate the extraordinary gift of ordinary existence.
John 1:14 - 'And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth' - is the Incarnation's affirmation of the ordinary and the particular: God chose to be found in the specific, the embodied, the local. Wilder's play is an extended meditation on this Johannine claim translated into secular form: the ordinary life of Grover's Corners - breakfast, schoolwork, courtship, the rhythm of days - is presented as participating in a significance that transcends itself. The Stage Manager, with his quasi-divine perspective on time and eternity, presents these ordinary lives as seen from the perspective of their ultimate significance.
Author and Context
Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) grew up in the household of a Congregationalist minister - his father was a newspaper editor and devotional writer - and was formed by the Protestant tradition that shapes the play's theological sensibility. He was also deeply influenced by classical literature (he translated plays from Latin and Greek), by European Modernism (he knew Gertrude Stein and was influenced by her experiments with time and narrative), and by the question of how to present universal human experience on stage without the distancing effects of conventional theatrical representation.
Wilder described Our Town as 'an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.' This is a theological project - the valuing of the ordinary as the site of ultimate significance - that connects to the Incarnation's affirmation of the bodily and particular. The Stage Manager as a quasi-divine narrator (who knows the future, controls time, addresses the audience directly) is Wilder's formal solution to the problem of presenting eternal significance in local and temporal events.
Themes
The play's central theological theme is the sacredness of ordinary time - the claim that the repetitive, unremarkable days of a small-town American life participate in a significance they cannot see from within. Emily's cry in Act Three - 'Does any human being ever realize life while they live it? - every, every minute?' - is the play's theological question: why are we unable to appreciate the gift of existence while we have it? The Stage Manager's answer - 'No. Saints and poets, maybe - they do some' - points toward the contemplative and creative traditions as partial solutions to the problem of human inattentiveness.
The town of Grover's Corners is Wilder's version of the universally particular - the place that is everywhere and nowhere, any small American town elevated to the status of a symbolic space where the fundamental human experiences of birth, love, and death are encountered in their purest form.
Reception
The play's initial reception was mixed - some critics found its sentimentality cloying and its theology naïve. But its hold on American theatrical life has proven extraordinary: it is produced in high schools, community theatres, and professional theatres in every American state every year, and has been produced in virtually every country in the world. The 1940 film adaptation starred William Holden and Martha Scott.
Legacy
Our Town established the template for American drama's engagement with the sacredness of ordinary life - a tradition continued by Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Sam Shepard. Its formal innovations (bare stage, Stage Manager-narrator, direct address to the audience) influenced every subsequent American theatrical experiment with time, death, and perspective. For students of the Bible it illustrates how the Johannine theology of the Incarnation - God in the ordinary and particular - can be dramatized without explicit Christian reference, for an audience of any or no religious background.