Our Town

I realized I never posted about seeing Our Town at the Barrow Street Theatre last Sunday. Well... I saw it with Sophie... and it was one of the best things I have seen in a really long time. Because the set was so bare and the theater was so intimate, I really got to pay attention to Thornton Wilder's script, which had a very interesting structure. The play, which took place in the small town of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, was broken up into three acts. The first is about basic life and growing up, the second is about getting married, and the last is about death.

However, the play is definitely not as simple as its main ideas make it seem. The entire play is narrated by the "stage manager," making it feel extremely informal and personal. He guides the audience through the small town, telling them everything they'd need to know in order to survive there. Although the characters lead pretty simple lives, they all show extremely real, human wants. One of the wives yearns to go to Paris; another one of the characters, George, is set on being a farmer. The audience automatically feels compassion for these people and their wants.

But the plot, as well as the questions raised throughout the play, thicken in the third act. One of the main characters, Emily, dies. The audience sees her in the afterlife, accompanied by others from Grover's Corners who have passed. after making a visit back to real life, she realizes how depressing it is to see people not appreciating life while they're living it. In this particular production, Emily's mother cooks bacon on stage, and the entire audience can even smell it. That was a pretty amazing way to add to Wilder's message, even though it was simple, and sort of cliched, the idea of "smelling the bacon." Emily willingly chooses to go back to her grave because she can't bare to be around all of the ignorance that living people exude. Wilder shows the audience that all of those who have died willingly choose to stay dead, in their graves, because the foolishness of humanity is so depressing.

The bones of Wilder's script are great. He wrote something extremely powerful; it doesn't just have to be a play, it is literature on its own. Although the actors in the production I saw were great, the script on it's own is so amazing that I think most productions of Our Town automatically can have some appeal. Wilder balanced simplicity with something very thought-provoking. In the production I saw people definitely seemed very moved. I would without a doubt recommend this play.