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Director's Notes:

Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) began writing his Pulitzer Prize winning play, Our Town, in 1924 while in residence at the MacDowell Colony, in Peterborough, New Hampshire. This town, which supported artists such as Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Virgil Thomson, served as the inspiration for Grover’s Corners. The play was finished in 1938 while the author was on a hermitage in Switzerland. The story of Our Town is a time capsule of quintessential American life in the early 20th century, finished in reaction to the mounting unrest in Europe and Asia. After the experience of serving in World War I, Wilder feared American small town life would simply become anthropological data for future civilizations to read about.

The Stage Manager, a role Wilder played for two weeks during the original run of the show on Broadway, acts as a liaison between the audience and the actors. She mentions the Babylonians, Greeks and Romans in a speech in Act I, and of how we know so little of their every day life. Like the distant traveling light of stars, we can see their path but cannot speak to their experience. Seeing the possibility of another great civilization lost to interpretation, Wilder lit a beacon to capture the spirit of eternity, community, and the human experience. Wilder described Our Town as “the life of a village against the life of the stars.”

Neither a comedy nor a drama: Our Town is a time play with the modern techniques of Brecht, Ibsen, Joyce and other European artists. The mind of the audience is meant to be stimulated by the absent portions of the spectacle. We are reminded that we are in a theater in Akron, Ohio in the opening line of the play and not in Grover’s Corners. This is the story of our town, of every town, every marriage, and every death. We are all George or Emily, burning for a brief moment on our path, orbited by those about us, and guided by the light of others.