Life Lessons in Everyone's Town The drama Our Town by Thornton Wilder takes place in the early 1900s in the fictitious town of Grover's Corners, a small New England community. Characters and daily life embody the heart and soul of small town life at the turn of the century, and the life lessons learned within the play's approximately two hour span leave audience members in a state of wonder about their own lives. Our Town is not your typical play. The scenery and daily lives of the residents are mostly mimed, and the Stage Manager is an actual character within the play. "Despite its abstract theatrical style, Our Town is emphatically rooted in the concrete American setting" (Konkle 137). In addition, many signifiers of American history …show more content…
In addition to taking on a few minor roles in the play, he is also the narrator. The character of the Stage Manager as a narrator serves as a "chorus" who portrays the town's characters not only as personalities, but according to Castellitto, also "as forces" (Castellitto 2). The Stage Manager provides the omniscient point of view. He is one who knows what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen in the future (Konkle 142). For example, at the beginning of the play, the Stage Manager predicts the deaths of three characters, and two of them are major (Konkle 135). According to Shuman, "It is this omniscience that links him with the dead, suggesting that the consciousness of death is only one way in which human kind knows eternity," and it is because of the Stage Manager that Grover's Corners is EVERY town(Shuman …show more content…
Life goes on. Emily dies, but her children live. The cemetery and the words spoken by the dead in Act III force play goers to see life for what it is--fleeting and transient, while still leaving them with a since of hope for the future and a reverence for the beauty of life. However, as Konkle states, "... it is ironic that the realization of how wonderful life is comes only in viewing Emily's death, after life has been lost" (Konkle 144). Time and again, through statements made by the Stage Manager, the cycle of life, the evolution of society, and lessons learned along the way are emphasized. His interruptions throughout the play provide insight into key themes. For example, statements testifying to progress on various levels of experience are more plentiful, though understated for the most part as with everything else in the play. References to a new hospital, the town's population growth, the increase in the value of antique furniture, patented farm equipment, and the Ford's adaptation to farm work suggest "subtle, even mundane advances; nevertheless, they do represent improvements in the quality of life" (Konkle
Mark Lambeck uses the drama’s setting to relate Intervention to the audience. Specifically, he uses a vague yet understandable modern time. An audience can relate knowing they could experience the same thing on any given day. The location of the play is also a place an audience could easily find themselves. It is vague place that could represent almost anywhere, perhaps in where the audience is. In the current world, one could easily find themselves walking down the street on their cell phone. The characters are constant...
Wilder uses devices such as the lack of props and connecting us to the cast to enable us to better relate to the play, thus showing us that these lessons are true in our own lives. He then uses strong shifts in perspective on events in our lives to drive home what is truly important in life. Wilder shows us that while time passes, our lives stay relatively the same. Wilder uses these
Thornton Wilder effectively demonstrates the importance of life’s repetition in Our Town through the cycle of life, George and Emily’s love, and the playing of “Blessed Be the Tie that Binds.” The cycle of life is shown repeating from birth to life to death and back to birth again. George and Emily’s love is repetitious and unending, even after the death of Emily, which demonstrates the importance of life. As “Blessed Be the Tie that Binds” is recurrently heard throughout the play, it serves as a bridge through a void of time or place, which is important in understanding the play. It is no wonder that Wilder achieved a Pulitzer Prize for his in-depth work of life.
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town both explore the fulfillment of life. Emily and Willy Loman fail to take advantage of their lives because they have the wrong priorities and do not take the time appreciate what they already have. Willy focuses solely on achieving his dreams of success as a salesman and helping Biff become a great man, resulting in him ignoring his family, declining status in society, and reality, leading to his demise. He never realizes what he has lost by chasing after inconceivable dreams; however, Wilder’s Emily reflects on her life after she dies and begins to understand that her lack of appreciation for the little moments took away from the fullness of her life. Even though Wilder and Miller tell two unique stories, they use similar methods to show their thoughts on living and essentially convey the same message about how dreams can ruin people and how not appreciating the little things takes away from the quality of life.
Each character, in some capacity, is learning something new about themselves. Whether it be new views, new feelings, newfound confidence, or a new realization of past events, each character involved in the play realizes something view-altering by the end of the play. Bonny is realizing that she is growing up and discovering how to deal with boys, and to lie to her parents; Elsie realizes that she doesn’t need her father for everything, and eventually overcomes her fear of driving on her own; Grace is discovering that she must let her children think for themselves at times, and that she must let Charlie choose what he wants to do; and Charlie, of course, is discovering that there are more ways to think than the status quo that society presents. Each character obviously goes through very different struggles throughout the play, but in the end, they all result in realizing something about themselves they didn’t at the beginning of the
In what way is Wilder’s Our Town is an American Dream narrative because the characters in the play all portray actions of what is considered “normal” activities of the American people. For example, Mr. Webb talks about Emily and George’s wedding. He mentions that at all weddings women have the floor and are the main focus, that’s the way of a classic American wedding goes. Always have been and always will. As he says to George “All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder making sure that the knot’s tied in a mighty public way,” (59). Our Town exposed the buried secrets, hypocrisy, and oppression lurking beneath the surface of American small town life. Throughout the play Wilder presents a far more celebratory picture of a small town,
The Stage Manager is a man of many roles. Usually a stage manager is part of the non-acting staff and in complete charge of the bodily aspects of the production. In Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the Stage Manager goes well beyond his usual function in a play and undertakes a large role as a performer. In Our Town the Stage Manager is a narrator, moderator, philosopher, and an actor. Through these roles the Stage Manager is able to communicate the theme of universality in the play. The main role of the Stage Manager is that of narrator and moderator. He keeps the play moving by capsule summations and subtle hints about the future. "I’ve married over two-hundred couples in my day. Do I believe in it? I don’t know? M….marries N….millions of them. The cottage, the go-cart, the Sunday-afternoon drives in the Ford, the first rheumatism, the grandchildren, the second rheumatism, the deathbed, the reading of the will-once in a thousand times it’s interesting"(699). Here the Stage Manager is giving insight about George and Emily’s future. He is hinting about their life and fate to come. "Goin’ to be a great engineer, Joe was. But the war broke out and he died in France. All that education for nothing" (673). The incidents discussed about are great events in George, Emily, and Joe’s lives. The Stage Manage emphasizes that the short things in these people’s lives are overlooked. There isn’t realization that it is the small parts of their lives that make a difference. His role as narrator differs from most narration. The Stage Manager’s narration shows casualness. The casualness connects the Stage Manager to the audience. "Presently the STAGE MANAGER, hat on and pipe in mouth…he has finished setting the stage and leaning against the right proscenium pillar watches the late arrivals in the audience."(671) The informality is evident since he smokes a pipe, wears a hat, and leans formally against the proscenium pillar. He also greets and dismisses the audience at the beginning and end of each act. The stage manager interrupts daily conversation on the street. The Stage Manager enters and leaves the dialog at will. He is also giving the foresight of death in the play. His informality in dress, manners, and speech, connects the theme, universality, of the production to the audience.
Newly dead, Emily was able to look down on Grover’s Corners from a different perspective. From her new perspective, she realized that the lives of the living were much different than the lives of the dead. The stage manager explained “the dead don’t stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they lose hold of the earth… and the ambitions they had… and the pleasures they had… and the things they suffered… and the people they loved…” (Wilder, 88). Since the dead were capable of looking over Grover’s Corners, they saw what the living could not. They did not stay interested in the living because it pained them to watch how ignorant they were. After enlightenment, the dead had no reason to hold onto their old lives. While looking down on Grover’s Corners, Emily was quickly able to tell that the live residents were living in a false reality, and asked the other dead “Live people don’t understand, do they?” (Wilder, 96). What the living did not understand was how lucky they were to be alive. They took everything for granted because they had no opportunity to look at their lives from a different perspective, as the dead had. After further examination, Emily concluded that “They’re sort of shut up in little boxes, aren’t they?” (Wilder, 96). Although Emily was not referring to the people of Grover’s
Have you ever stopped to realize life for what it truly means? Every day we go about our lives taking things for granted without even realizing the value in every moment we are given. Playwright Thornton Wilder portrays this message in the play Our Town and he does it using unorthodox theatrical approaches. By using the Stage Manager to break the “fourth-wall”, Wilder is able to have a stronger impact on those who are listening. Wilder also creates not only a seemingly boring town, but also extremely bland lives of flat characters. By doing this, he is able to emphasize events such as marriage, birth, and death with characters Emily Webb and George Gibbs. Through them, Wilder intentionally shows how beautiful life itself is, especially the seemingly insignificant moments. He uses the technique of manipulating time by rushing through each act as well as including
...usual life such as Emily who turned into a murderer, killing her own boyfriend and Louise Mallard dead after living her "real life" for one hour, feels her feeling free from repression during her husband death and finally died of heart disease when she knew that her husband is alive.
In act one when the stage manager pulls Mr. Webb out of the play to talk with him on page 528, the lady in the box asks "Oh Mr. Webb? Mr. Webb is there any culture or love of beauty in Grover's Corners?". Mr. Webb her, there isn't much culture the way she might think, but "... we've got a lot of pleasures of a kind here: We like the sun comin' up over the mountain in the morning, and we all notice a good deal about the birds. We pay a lot of attention to them. And we watch the change of the seasons..." These are the things that the people of Grover's Corners appreciate, the things we take for granted.
Our Town is social satire in that it portrays that a small town like Grover’s Corners is like every other small town. Those families are all the same in small towns; they go to school and when they graduate they get married and have kids. The males get jobs and the women take care of the house and children. Another way of it’s a social satire is through their use of minimal scenery and pantomimed actions; the paperboy throws imaginary newspapers, the children pretend to eat breakfast. This then forces each person in the audience to imagine objects that do not really exist. The imaginary quality of these objects makes the play more universal, and make the members of the audience use their own sense of imagination to envision the props in their own way. It really allows the audience to be involved and feel included in the production. This perhaps could be one of the main reasons this play was such a success with a lot of people in general. By doing some research on the play I found a number of scholars and reviewers that have criticized the homogeneity of Grover’s Corners, a largely white, Protestant town. Our Town has been derided as an escapist fantasy that ignores the realities of the racism, sexism, and economic hardship that defined American life during Wilder’s era and that continue, to some degree, to define American life
Then when Emily was two the narrator raise enough money to put Emily in nursery school. The climax of the story is that when Emily performs a comedy act on the stage and suddenly everyone like her especially her mother, or the narrator and the narrator's said that she does not let her go, but has no choice to let her go. Eventually, the narrator got remarried and the narrator was most of her time in the hospital, so she could deliver her second child named Susan, but most of the time Emily was left alone because she has the illness that caused her not see her mother or Susan. After all, that happens the sad part was that after she was sick she did not recover as easily they had hope like having terrible nightmares and the narrator wanted to comfort Emily but she could not because she had trouble to stop moving, and now Emily realizes that she does not want the comfort of her
In this play Everyman makes a point and big emphasis that death is inevitable to every human being. This play is simply in its morality and in its story. You shouldn’t be so keen on all the material things in life and forget the purpose of your life. Your personal pleasures are merely transitory, but the eternal truth of life is that death is imminent and is eternal. It is the bitter truth that everyone has to accept it. If you are born you will die one day. Science does not believe in religion. But one day Science will also end in Religion. Everyone should live their life fearful of God and accept Christ as their Savior.
the role of a narrator. One role he takes on in the play is the voice