Theatre
Our Town
Thornton Wilder · 1938
Synopsis
A stage manager walks onto a bare stage, with no set and no curtain, introduces the audience to Grover's Corners, a small town in New Hampshire, then brings on a professor and the newspaper editor to describe it. First act, a day in May 1901: the milkman goes by, Doctor Gibbs comes home from a delivery, George Gibbs and Emily Webb, children of two neighbouring families, do their homework at their windows. Second act, three years later, on the day of their wedding. Third act, nine years later, the cemetery hill, where the dead sit on chairs.
Context
According to its author, the scenery was removed so as to restore their value to the small details of life. The play was given one evening in Princeton on 22 January 1938, then in Boston, where the trial run fell flat, before opening on Broadway on 4 February 1938, produced and directed by Jed Harris, with Frank Craven as the Stage Manager; Wilder himself played the part for two weeks. It won the Pulitzer Prize and ran for three hundred and thirty-six performances. Sam Wood made a film of it in 1940. It is said to be performed somewhere in the United States every night of the year.
Who it is for
Three acts, with a narrator who addresses the audience. Translated into French by Julie Vatain in 2012.
Prizes and reception
Pulitzer Prize 1938; a difficult start in Boston, then success in New York, and one of the most performed plays in the American repertoire.
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