American Theatre in the Twentieth Century Week three: Our Town by Thornton Wilder (1938) First performed January 22, 1938 at the McCarter Theatre, Princeton, and then on Broadway

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American Theatre in the Twentieth CenturyWeek
threeOur Townby Thornton Wilder (1938)First
performed January 22, 1938 at the McCarter
Theatre, Princeton, and then on Broadway
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Thornton Wilder (1897-1975)
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Thornton Wilder

• 1897 Born in Madison, Wisconsin. Father the U.S.
  Consul General to Hong Kong and Shanghai.
• 1915-1917 Attends Oberlin College, Ohio. Writes
  short plays.
• 1920 At Yale, continues writing plays which are
  three minutes long and feature three characters.
• 1921 Studies archaeology in Rome and sees
  Pirandellos Six Characters in Search of An
  Author.
• 1927 Second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
  wins Pulitzer Prize.
• 1930 Lecturer at University of Chicago
  publishes The Woman of Andros.
• 1938 Our Town premiered. Wins Pulitzer Prize.

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Our Town mini-lecture

• Attacks on Wilder the novelist
• Michael Golds socio-political criticism
• Wilders response in Our Town
• What makes an American?
• Wilders influences European, modernist

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Golds criticism

• A pastel, pastiche, dilettante religion,
  without the true neurotic blood and fire, a
  daydream of homosexual figures in graceful gowns
  moving archaically among the lilies. It is
  Anglo-Catholicism, that last refuge of the
  American literary snob.
• - Michael Gold, The New Republic, 1930.

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The kinds of social problems in the Depression
era that Gold accused Wilder of ignoring
Dorothea Lange, Imperial Valley, California,
February and March 1937.
Migrant mother, aged 18, with child.
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Dorothea Lange, Imperial Valley, California,
February and March 1937.
A drought refugee living in a camp on the bank of
an irrigation ditch.
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Wilders response?
Our Town is escapist, but self-consciously and
defiantly so, acknowledging the divisive issues
of ethnic diversity, economic hardship and social
injustice, but then deliberately dismissing them
in pointed rejection of the Lefts contentions
that only writing about the immediate problems of
the day could be significant. (David Eldridge,
American Culture in the 1930s, p.58.)
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Wilders response?

• Given the arduous decade of the 1930s, Our Town
  balances faith with existential alienation, and
  enjoins us to remain alive in the moment and to
  practice mindfulness of others.
• (Anne Fletcher, Reading Across the 1930s, in A
  Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama,
  ed. by David Krasner, p.122.)

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What makes an American?

• Americans are abstract. They are disconnected.
  They have a relation, but it is to everywhere, to
  everybody, and to always. That is not new, but it
  is very un-European.
• - Toward an American Language, Charles Eliot
  Norton lectures, Harvard, 1950.

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everybody, everywhere, always

• REBECCA But listen, its not finished the
  United States of America Continent of North
  America Western Hemisphere the Earth the Solar
  System the Universe the Mind of God thats
  what it said on the envelope.
• GEORGE What do you know!
• (Act I)

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everybody, everywhere, always

• STAGE MANAGER Now there are some things we
  all know, but we dont takem out and look atm
  very often. We all know that something is
  eternal. And it aint houses and it aint names,
  and it aint earth, and it aint even the
  starseverybody knows in their bones that
  something is eternal, and that something has to
  do with human beings. All the greatest people
  ever lived have been telling us that for five
  thousand years and yet youd be surprised how
  people are always losing hold of it. Theres
  something way down deep thats eternal about
  every human being.
• (Act III)

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Influences
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Pirandello and Stein

• Pirandello demanded that it should not be the
  false truth of the stage but the positive,
  undeniable truth of life that is evident from
  the play.
• Wilder life imitated is life raised to a higher
  power.
• Stein the play should be considered as a
  landscape. Relationships can exist merely by
  presenting characters in the same time and space
  on stage.
• Wilder On the stage it is always now the
  personages are standing on that razor edge
  between the past and the future, which is the
  essential character of conscious being the words
  are arising to their lips in immediate
  spontaneity. (Paris Review interview.)

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Characterisation

• Wilder sees his characters in this play not
  primarily as personalities, as individuals, but
  as forces, and he individualizes them only enough
  to carry the freight, so to speak, of their roles
  as forces.
• (The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller, p.79.)

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Wilder playing the part of the Stage Manager in a
1959 production of the play at the Williamstown
Theatre Festival in Massachusetts.
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Performance history and critical response

• The play escaped from the formal barrier of
  the modern theatre into the quintessence of
  acting, thought and speculation By stripping
  the play of everything that is not essential, Mr.
  Wilder has given it a profound, strange,
  unworldly significance.
• - Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times,
  February 5, 1938.

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• In Act III, why do you think Wilder includes a
  repetition of the morning scene from 1899 (waking
  up, having breakfast, etc.). Do you think it is
  effective?
• How does Wilder try to give Act III a universal
  quality rather than have it just refer to a small
  town in the early twentieth century?
• Considering the whole play
• Technically,the play is not arbitrary in any
  detail. (Arthur Miller.) Find some examples of
  Wilders deliberate choices of objects and
  places. Why does he use them?
• Is it more important to have a socially-aware
  drama? Consider the Gold vs. Wilder debate here.
• Does Wilder have a tragic vision?
• Explain Edward Albees comment that Our Town is
  one of the toughest, saddest plays every written.
  Why is it always produced as hearts and flowers?
  Is he right? Why is it produced in this way?