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How To Write A Critical Appreciation Of The Play Our Town

Decent Essays

I watched the play “Our Town”, produced by PBS and written by Thorn Wilder. “Our Town”, is a play that when taken at first glance seems about as plain and mundane as you can get, but the audience quickly learns that this play is much more than a simple viewing of the day to day activities of a few inhabitants of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, a quintessential rendition of Small Town, U.S.A. during the early 1900’s. Thorn Wilder himself describes his critically acclaimed masterpiece best, saying “It’s a little play with all the big subjects in it”. As it first got rolling I thought I was in for a painful two hours, but about halfway through I was surprised at how much I was enjoying myself and how interested I was in both the characters and the direction of the story. In this essay, I will be going over some of these “big subjects”, and certain aspects of the actual performance. The …show more content…

He performs several fourth wall break monologues where he explains everything from the layout of the town, to the deep, complex, and eternal implications of the normal actions done by ordinary people. Instead of relying on the audience member to read into the subtext of what’s happening on stage and to glean the deeper meaning of the myriad symbols and metaphors, the “Stage Manager” facilitates a role that packages all of Thorn Wilder’s thoughts and ideas into a neat, tidy package. Paul Newman delivers these ideas in a direct, concise, and eloquently simple manner with a performance that was both powerful and sincere. I was completely entranced on his more serious monologues, always feeling like I was receiving some kind of cosmic truth that would give me a wiser perspective on not only my own life, but on how I view the lives of others. Introspection is one of the running themes in “Our

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