Critique Of Thornton Wilder's 'Our Town'

Have you ever thought that even the littlest things in life can make the biggest difference? One of the themes of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town is people never fully appreciate the wonders of daily life. People take everything for granted and don’t really realize how the little things in life actually make a huge impact on your life. Wilder shows examples of the little things in life many times in each of the acts throughout the play. Our Town is about a young couple who falls in love and ends up spending their life together. The young couple overlooks the small but important things in life. Throughout Our Town, Wilder informs us about how all people don’t appreciate the little things in life that actually make a huge difference.

Our Town is a story on how humans does not fully appreciate life until they die and realize what they did and want to go back and change it. Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town is about a town life in three acts. The three acts are as followed. Daily Life, Companionship, and Death.It shows how people live and die and how they regret things they did on earth and come to see the big picture of life. Wilder argues, because life is short we must appreciate the joys of living until we die.

Our Town is a play written by Thornton Wilder set in a small town known as Grover’s Corners. Wilder conjured the Stage Manager to be a representation to the theme of the play. The theme of universality placing Grover’s Corners in view with the rest of the world. Wilder makes a point to the audience that people have a big impact and influence over the next person, whether they were important or insignificant to that individual’s life. Therefore, the Stage Manager emphasizes on this very viewpoint that the lives of certain people are overlooked so are their influences. The Stage Manager himself is a physical embodiment of Wilders own views and opinions of humans and life itself. Throughout the play, the Stage Manager plays various of roles in order to force the realization to the audience into understanding the importance human life and the influence of others.

The movie Our Town was a 1938 American three-act play directed by Thornton Wilder. The movie tells the story about a fictional American town known as Grover’s Corners between 1901 and 1913. Throughout the mover, the director uses meta-theatrical tools to set the play in the theatres where such play was being conducted. The main character in this film is the stage manager who addresses the audience directly. The stage manager also brings in guest lecturers into the play by fielding questions from the viewers as well as filling some of the roles (TheConnection np). The major differences between this play and others are that the actors perform without a proper set and the acting is done without props.

Our Town by Thornton Wilder continues to be a timeless theatrical work performed pervasively throughout the world. This play remains a modern classic due to Wilder’s ingenuity in capturing the quintessential expression of the life cycle. Wilder segmented his play into three acts; each act broadly encompassing a different phase in a person’s life. The play presents the audience with situations parallel to the ones almost everyone faces during their lifetime. This, in conjunction with breaking the fourth wall, allows for the audience to feel a part of the performance. The title of the play itself lends to this feeling, for it is not my town or your town, but it’s Our Town. This play emphasizes the idea that in the grand scheme of things, all

Moving on, social occurrences like rumors, excessive town gossip, to casual acquaintances display themselves throughout Wilder’s play, just as in Colby. All in all, differences show in basic numbers of population and statistical comparison, but, otherwise, remain similar in the interrelationships of town-life.

Our Town is a play that takes place near the turn of the century in the small rural town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. The playwright, Thornton Wilder is trying to convey the importance of the little, often unnoticed things in life. Throughout the first two acts he builds a scenario, which allows the third act to show that we as humans often run through life oblivious to what is actually happening. Wilder attempts to show life as something that we take for granted. We do not realize the true value of living until we are dead and gone. The through-line of the action seems to be attention to the details of life. Wilder builds up a plot that pays attention to great details of living.

Our Town is play written a while ago, but it relates to any time. Showing that routine is a part of everybody’s life. No matter what day and age you live in your going to have a routine. This play shows an example of two families and their daily routines. The whole play relates to routine even the different acts.

The play began with the stage manager (Jackson Mendes) welcoming the audience into the theater as he introduces the people and the places of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire in 1901. Grovers corners is pictured as the perfect American town before any urbanization, automobiles are unusual,

Our Town is different from most plays. It starts with barely any scenery, forcing the viewer to use their imagination. In the beginning the set manager comes on stage and describes the scene while also making sure that everything is under control; he plays an oversoul or God-like figure. Act I describes birth. The play commences before dawn and the first call Dr. Gibbs receives that morning is for the

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804 in Salem Massachusetts and died on May 19, 1964 in Plymouth New Hampshire. Mr. Hawthorne was injured when he was young and during that time he became fascinated with literature and writing, eventually he went to college and made friends many of whom are famous classic writers. After graduation he returned home and wrote many of his famous book, The Hollows of the Three Hills, An Old Woman's Tale, My Kinsman, and many more. During this time Hawthorne worked for the Boston Custom House, where he met his first wife. They eventually got married, moved to Massachusetts, and had three children. Due to financial reasons they moved back to Salem and he got a job at the Salem Custom House, soon he was let go due to the election of a new president named Zachary Taylor. During this time he started writing again, this is when he wrote The Scarlet Letter.

Our Town presents life as it truly is; as humans, we tend to only remember the big events in our life, and neglect the minute details. Throughout the book, Wilder entertains the notion that humans have learned to seemingly distance themselves from anything that doesn’t have immediate value to their memories. Our Town proves this notion by examining key aspects of the average person’s life in Grover’s Corners- childhood and marriage. To quote the Stage Manager as they exclaim in Act I, “This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying”.

Our Town by Thornton Wilder is a play that a first glance appears to be dull and quite ordinary play but if analyzed is a complex tragedy with a deep meaning. It is set in a small town in New Hampshire called Grover’s Corners, in the early 1900s, with a population of about 2,000 people. It is enforced throughout the play that the town is not extraordinary and very routine. This foundation is what highlights the overall message that the play conveys; death is inevitable, life is short and always taken for granted. The play also includes many plain characters, one of which is a woman named Emily Webb. She is not a extravagant character, rather undeveloped, but has a significant role in being the tragic hero.

Wilder used experimental techniques in staging the play to complement the experimental innovations in characterization and structure. There is minimal scenery in Our Town, which was a technique never tried before: “The audience, arriving, sees an empty stage… the Stage Manager begins placing a table and three chairs” (p. 3). There is also no curtain. The act begins with an open stage. Every single play produced before this had a curtain. Wilder was one of, if not the first, to use this innovative style for his work. There are no props in the show either. The actors have to pantomime their actions where props would typically be used: “carrying an imaginary rack with milk bottles.” (p. 10). To add more detail to the character’s actions, there

Thornton Niven Wilder was born on April 17, 1897 in Madison, Wisconsin to Amos Parker Wilder and Isabella Niven Wilder. The Wilder children grew to see success. Amos Wilder, Thornton’s older brother, became a Hollis Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School, an American poet, a founder in the field of theopoetics, as well as a nationally ranked tennis player. Charlotte Wilder made her success as an American poet. Janet Wilder Dakin, the youngest sibling of Thornton, received a Ph.D. in zoology and became a zoologist as well as a philanthropist. Thornton was noted at an early age for his intelligence and was unfortunately teased during his childhood. He would seek sanctuary in his schools’ libraries and would write plays. Eventually, he received an education from the universities of Yale and Princeton. Afterwards, Thornton became an accomplished novelist and playwright.