Our Town By Thornton Wilder

Our Town is a play written by Thornton Wilder in 1937. Our Town is a play about the daily life in Act One, love and marriage in Act Two and death and dying in Act Three. The play is about two main characters, Emily Webb and George Gibbs. The play in Act One just goes through the daily life of the characters. Act Two it shows the love and marriage between these two characters and last Act Three shows life after death of the characters. The play has a man called the Stage Manager that is mainly a narrator throughout the play but also takes on the role of people in the town. The Stage Manager knows many thing about the people in the play Our Town.  The Stage Manager steps in, describes scenes, and seems to start and stop the action of the play whenever he wants. The Stage Manager has many similarities to God. The Stage Manager doesn't only know everything about everyone, he can also see into the future. The Stage Manager is also present in every scene watching it all play out. The Stage Manager and God are different because the Stage Manager unlike God makes

In the town of Grover’s Corner Wisconsin, there lies a small farm town with all the small town aspects. The newspaper editor runs the newspaper from his own house as the doctor runs the clinic from his house. The small town being shown through the combination uses of one building, giving off the small town feel, “The town hall and post office combined; jail’s in the basement” (Wilder 4). The younger men have the jobs of delivering the milk and newspapers in the morning. “Joe Juniors getting up so as to deliver the paper” (Wilder 6). In Our Town there is Irony among the fact that the Joe Crowell graduated from the head of his high school class and his college class, then went and died in the war. Throughout the story, the author Thornton Wilder uses mood and tone to really help describe and explain what the play is telling us.

The Outsiders, a novel by S.E. Hilton is set in Oklahoma in the 1960s, tells the story of a group of greasers that will always back each other up no matter what the situation. On the other hand, the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder, is set a small town in New Hampshire in the early 1900s that focuses on the lifestyles of common people that share common interests and live together as a whole community. Both stories emphasize the theme of cherishing life.

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.

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 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 focuses on the lives of the residents of small town Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire in the early 1900s, more specifically, the lives of young George Gibbs and Emily Webb. Throughout Act I, Thornton describes the daily lives of the people of Grover’s Corners. The milkman delivers the day’s milk, the paperboy brings the morning paper, mothers prepare breakfast, and children get ready for school. The day winds down, everyone has had their supper, homework is finished, and adults arrive home from choir practice. Life in Grover’s Corners is traditional, ordinary, and unremarkable, not much goes on out of the ordinary. Act II focuses on love and marriage in the town. The narrator says “Almost everybody in the world gets married, - you know what I mean? In our town there aren’t hardly any exceptions. Most everybody in the world climbs into their graves married.” and Mrs. Gibbs articulates that “People are meant to go through life two by two. Tain’t natural to be lonesome.”(54) George and Emily get married, much like the other young couples of Grover’s Corners, and proceed to live blithely and contentedly on George’s uncle’s farm. Act III looks into the last act in a person’s life, death. Emily passes away during childbirth, and at the cemetery, she meets the spirits of her mother-in-law and many other deceased townspeople.

In Our Town, by Thornton Wilder, he invites his readers to consider the positive and negative qualities of life. He is able to convey his views and opinions on the human condition through his use of love and marriage. Wilder’s examination of self-conflict in the decision to marry suggests a pessimistic view on the human experience. Through the self-conflict of Emily and George, Wilder is able to confirm how marriage can be frightening and troubling.

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town usually shows moments where the audience is connected to the cosmos and then back to earth. Due to Wilder’s history it is not surprising that he wants to connect to the cosmos. Throughout Wilder’s play time becomes something people lose track of, including the Stage Manager. Wilder goes into detail about how easy it is to take the time someone has on the planet for granted. The characters who are deceased talk about how the living don’t pay attention to their lives during their time on earth. Time is a theme throughout especially in the end when Emily herself realizes that she hasn’t had enough time.

How and in what way is Our Town a work of sentimental fiction and social satire? Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is remembered as a sweet, sentimental, and simple production presented over the years. Wilders play defies the most conventional theatrical genres. Our Town is a work of sentimental fiction because it shows the transience of human life. This play connects all the people living in the small town of Glover’s Corners.

The common phrase, “enjoy the little things because one day you might look back and realize that they were the big things,” is a phrase that represents a main theme in Our Town. When writing this play, Thornton Wilder kept one thing in mind: simplicity. He did this for the sole purpose of emphasizing the theme of this play, which is appreciating the simple little things in life. A main thing that surprised audiences when this play came out was how simple the set was.