I recently started listening to Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (read by Meryl Streep, no less) and quickly decided to pause. I don’t know how much of the novel is about putting on a production of Our Town (1938) by Thornton Wilder, but even if it is only the opening chapters, I was feeling very at sea. Patchett obviously assumes knowledge of this play which I absolutely didn’t have.
Am I right in saying that Our Town is a staple of American high school productions? I’ve heard it referenced plenty of times, though only as a cultural mainstay, rather than what it is actually about. And of course reading a play isn’t as good as seeing it performed, but needs must – and now I’ve read all about the everytown of Grover’s Corners.
If, like me, you don’t know the play – here’s a quick intro. Over the course of three acts, it looks at Grover’s Corners in 1901, 1904, and 1913. Over that time, the main characters are drawn from two families: the Gibbs and the Webbs. Charles and Myrtle are parents to Emily and Wally; Dr Frank and Julia are parents to George. Much of the later play is taken up by the marriage of George and Emily, and what happens afterwards – though it is told in a very unconventional way.
Coming to this blank, I had no idea what to expect. And it is a lot more formally inventive than I had anticipated. Rather than simply present the townsfolk of this ordinary town, it is done in an interesting, metatheatrical way (perhaps this is why high schools love teaching it?) Characters don’t just remember scenes – they relive them, on stage, in guise as their younger selves. We even get quite a lot of the afterlife. The Stage Manager is a sort of stage God, filtering and to an extent controlling all of the goings on. He is also open about the artifice of it all – early on, for example, when trellises are wheeled on: “Here’s a couple of trellises for those who feel they have to have scenery.”
He also has a longish speech that – correct me if I’m wrong – I’d guess is one of the most quoted from the play, because it explains Wilder’s purpose in writing it. Here’s part of the speech:
Y’know — Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about ’em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts … and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney — same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real lives of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then. So I’m going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now’ll know a few simple facts about us–more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight. See what I mean? So, – people a thousand years from now – this is the way we were in the provinces North of New York at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, – this is the way we were – in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.
And yet, even reading it on the page, you can tell that Our Town dodges the postmodern trap of cleverness wiping out compassion. I still cared about Emily and George, and I’m sure I’d care about them a lot more if I saw them on stage. There are also plenty of funny lines, and I particularly enjoyed Mrs Gibbs saying: “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.”
I’m glad I read Our Town and I feel like I can place one more piece of the jigsaw of American literary culture – and now, of course, I’m also ready to read Tom Lake.
