**3.** *Our Town* **and Our Towns**

The religious premises of *Our Town* are well known. In Act III, the Stage Manager asserts an alternative, interim temporality: the dead are "weaned" from finite attachments (confronting limit-to) to prepare for "something important," for "the eternal part in them to come out clear" (awaiting limit-of). Rather than sins being purged as in Dante's *Purgatorio*, it is life concerns, relations, ambitions, memories—and "your identity Mrs. Smith?" (p. 82). Identity is a radical thing to lose, but even in *Paradiso* mystical union with divine grace entails some relaxation from fraught earthly identity. Wilder's weaning temporality has its logic: before we can move on, we need release from what holds us back, especially if moving on entails a new discernment. *Our Town* is an intricately constructed play nearly ruined by jillions of cozy productions and the impression that a pale New England provincialism proposes Wilder's normative view of American society.<sup>19</sup> To remain compelling, the play must show sources of disclosure and must apply levers of critique. My aim is to indicate where its forms of metatheatre and its religious premises intersect, seen in productions that resist the liabilities of nostalgia.

Behind a number of recent, edgy *Our Town*s is a Lincoln Center production of 1988, directed by Gregory Mosher (later broadcast on PBS, where I saw it) and remembered for Spalding Gray as the Stage Manager. The whole cast was stunning, particularly Eric Stoltz as George Gibbs and Penelope Ann Miller as Emily Webb, and it has been my reference point for the play. The staging was minimal as per the script, with period costumes except for Gray, who wore ordinary street clothes and spoke pointedly, without wizened crustiness. Detractors such as Frank Rich found him insufferable: *Our Town* can be dark but not *that* dark. Mel Gussow countered that though *realistically* dark, the show was not *cynically dark*. <sup>20</sup> In my view, Gussow and Gray got it right. The cast resisted nostalgia to find aching ambiguity amid the compressed simplicities of home, society, and New Englandish intonations.

Today, good productions of *Our Town* are likely to look and sound like our towns, with vocal, social, racial, and gender inclusivity. In 2017, Deaf West doubled the roles with signing and speaking actors to convey the usual point that even in a "multicultural utopia,"<sup>21</sup> we should cherish every moment. I regret not seeing it, nor a startling production directed by David Cromer, which originated with Chicago's Hypocrites company. Cromer sometimes played the Stage Manager. He spoke as if 'out of character,' in the hurried but casual cadences of an office manager—"showing the new employees where the water cooler and bathrooms are"—in stage space closely crowding audience

<sup>18</sup> My order of enumeration is merely convenient, from direct theatrical self-reflexivity to more indirect. If inspired by Paul Ricoeur's "threefold mimesis," I do not follow his order. It is possible my MT-3 corresponds to his mimesis-1, where human life always has a narrative quality that anticipates representation. My MT-1 (plays or performances that explicitly interpret themselves to audiences) may go with Ricoeur's mimesis-3, where we consciously interpret life in terms of narrative. Mimesis-2 is the narrative representation of life, as in fiction or history; it could include plays representing the performance of other plays, MT-2. See Ricoeur 1983, chp. 3.

<sup>19</sup> Richard Goldstone's biography, 1975, pp. 140–43, treats Wilder's play as a normative celebration. Whereas I see its universals of value-in-the-mundane, associated with liberal America, serving as engines of critical resistance, here and in *The Skin of Our Teeth* (1942). Penelope Niven's *Thornton Wilder: A Life* (Niven 2012) gives a nuanced account of *Our Town*'s making: he wrote Act III near Zurich (p. 442), while watching Europe and the world "rush into an abyss" (his words, p. 420). She finds a remarkable "amalgam of sources" immediate to the imagining of the play: "Ibsen and Nestroy, Dante and Molière, Gertrude Stein and Alfred North Whitehead" along with "Goethe, Balzac, and Nietzsche" (p. 426). Lincoln Konkle 2006, pp. 131–49, situates the play's idealized past and fraught historical present in the tradition of Puritan sermons and jeremiads.

<sup>20</sup> Rich 1988; Gussow 1988. To be fair, Rich was decidedly mixed, praising the cast except for Gray, whom he thought incongruously repeated tones from his monologue and 1987 film, *Swimming to Cambodia*. But I find no "snide cynicism" in the 1989 PBS video, re-directed for television by Kirk Browning. Gussow noted that Gray "carefully avoids anything that might be misinterpreted as charm. At the same time, he is not dispassionate. He is, instead, realistic, as he explores the small pleasures and defeats in 'Our Town.'"

<sup>21</sup> McNulty 2017, review of Deaf West's production of *Our Town* at the Pasadena Playhouse, Sheryl Kaller director (accessed 12 July 2019).

space, the houselights always up; when Helen Hunt took over the part, she relished the incongruity of being called "Sir."<sup>22</sup> A danger in such universalizing approaches is that by eliminating 1901 New England rural particularity, the universals may sound thin. Cromer countered with a chilling *coup de théâtre* most reviewers at the time hesitated to spoil. In the third act, when Emily visits her past, the players donned turn-of-the-century attire. Then, more players than in the speaking cast brought in chairs to make for an uncomfortably packed graveyard. The audience found itself sitting among the uncounted dead.<sup>23</sup>

In what follows, I often have the 1988 show in mind, along with other productions. Since the Stage Manager's soliloquies are models for metatheatre-1, they may obscure -2 and -3 in the play; so, I will reverse the order here.

## *3.1. Metatheatre-3*

In *Our Town*, metatheatre-3 provides a living performative background for rituals (metatheatre-2) like the wedding and funeral. By performative background, I mean social roles and parts routinely played (e.g., lover, soldier, physician, parent); effective speech and gestures (promising, giving); and audience-like, distanced witnessing of others' performances. On the morning of the wedding, Act II, Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs (Frank and Julia) are at breakfast, itself loosely a ritual. He mentions another ritual, having overheard George shaving and *practicing* "'I do' to the mirror, but it don't sound too convincing to me" (p. 51). Frank then recalls their own wedding: "There I was in the Congregational Church marryin' a total stranger." His liminal fear back then was loss of words after a few weeks of conversation.

I was afraid we'd run out and eat our meals in silence, that's a fact. Well, you and I have been conversing for twenty years now without any noticeable barren spells.

MRS. GIBBS: Well,—good weather, bad weather—'tain't very choice, but I always find something to say. (p. 53)

Not only are the Gibbs describing ritual, they are critics of their performance. Catherine Bell argues that ritual's effectiveness depends on keeping its arbitrary, power-aggrandizing nature hidden, and Stephen Greenblatt believes staging ritual in theatre "empties" it of power by exposing its artifice.<sup>24</sup> The Gibbs seem to register such worries—were the dialogue by Beckett, it might evoke absurdity—yet also refute them. Their ironizing routine talk at breakfast (artificial, different-yet-the-same) enlarges their and our sense of this breakfast ritual's import.

The Stage Manager then takes us back to the day the romance began. After arguing and reconciling at the drugstore soda fountain, where George decides not to go to agricultural school but farm in Grover's Corners and "improve" his character, George says to Emily, "So I guess this is an important talk we've been having" (p. 69). His statement observes their conversation like an audience, from a retrospective distance. The effect of this distance is to heighten their awareness of the talk's significance, a heightening the whole play attempts for its audience.<sup>25</sup> To forgo college and school-smart independence to marry locally indicates the weight of social scripts. Played one way, it creates nostalgia; played differently, it could signal in Wilder a bourgeois complacency.<sup>26</sup> Played yet another direction, the stereotypes are part of a critique that still honors simplicity. Wilder wrote *Our Town* with European democracy on the brink. By 1938, its pre-automobile, pre-radio, pre-women's

<sup>22</sup> See Isherwood 2009, review of *Our Town*, Barrow St. Theatre production, David Cromer director; Patrick Healy 2010, reviewing Cromer's production now with Helen Hunt in the part of Stage Manager.

<sup>23</sup> Shirley 2012, review of *Our Town* (with Hunt), at the Broad Stage in Pasadena, CA (accessed 12 July 2019).

<sup>24</sup> Bell 1992, pp. 206–7; Greenblatt 1998, p. 126.

<sup>25</sup> See Von Balthasar 1988, p. 83, on Wilder's "telescopic camera."

<sup>26</sup> States 1985, pp. 97–99; Driver 1970, pp. 339–40.

suffrage, pre-war, pre-Depression time was already a fading myth, imagined in an isolated 'corner' of New Hampshire.<sup>27</sup> While Wilder shows via this mythos the unrecognized yet super-abundant value of ordinary moments—within "the Universe, the Mind of God" (p. 45)—there are also critical impulses that good productions find.

Critique is noticeable in the portrayal of church choir director, organist, and suicide Simon Stimson. None will state what finally destroys him, other than alcohol. "Well, he's seen a peck of trouble, one thing after another. . . " trails off Mr. Webb, editor of the paper (p. 43). Was Simon gay and beside himself in marriage, depressive, trapped in debt, desperately bored, traumatized by culture?<sup>28</sup> Indeed, 'culture' is another critique in *Our Town*. From the audience someone asks, "Is there no one in town aware of social injustice and industrial inequality?" And another, "Mr. Webb, is there any culture or love of beauty in Grover's Corners?" "Well, ma'am there ain't much—not in the sense that you mean." People attend to seasons, sunrises, and birds. They like *Robinson Crusoe*, the Bible, Handel, and Whistler's "Mother" (pp. 24,25). The Mind of (nature's) God and the blessed "ties that bind" encompass these matters of culture, history, and natural beauty. Yet the play knows our experience of this Mind to be ambiguous, as much of anguish as delight when trying to fathom life and death in its context. (The Stage Manager interrupts to say that paperboy Joe Crowell will study engineering and then die fighting in France, "All that education for nothing," p. 10).

## *3.2. Metatheatre-2*

*Our Town*'s ceremonies and rituals fit metatheatre-2 (plays within plays). There is the wedding, a choir rehearsal, and a hymn sung at Emily's funeral. More subtly in Act III, Emily observes her twelfth birthday, almost as if seeing a play. In plays or performances within plays, the outer play becomes the 'limit-of' dimension of the inner play. The limit-of the inner play can imply questions about limit dimensions of worlds for the audience. And when the inner performance (represented through the outer) is a ritual, where communication with transcendence is implied or expressed, then the limit-of implication may become explicit, as with the wedding.

"I play the minister." The Stage Manager's comments here are both metatheatre-1—he addresses us directly—and -2, for they are a sermon at a wedding. "This is a good wedding, but people are so put together that even at a good wedding there's a lot of confusion way down deep in people's minds and we thought that ought to be in our play, too" (p. 71). Later, in Act III, he will say that "way down deep" we know of something "eternal." Here, the down deep is "confusion." He also speculates on the metaphysics of this "sacrament" (though in the terms of a Congregational modernist, not a Catholic) and tells us "the real hero of this scene" is nature.

It's like what one of those European fellas said: every child born into the world is nature's attempt to make a perfect human being. Well, we've seen nature pushing and contriving for some time now. We all know that nature's interested in quantity; but I think she's interested in quality, too,—that's why I'm in ministry.

And don't forget all the other witnesses at this wedding,—the ancestors. Millions of them. Most of them set out to live two-by-two, also. Millions of them. (p. 71)<sup>29</sup>

If a kind of "interested" nature is the limit-of dimension (for the "perfecting" of human being), it is also the confusion we feel within, where eternity and value are found. What is more, this place at the edge of limit-of and limit-to includes "other witnesses," "the ancestors," an implied audience

<sup>27</sup> See Goldstone 1975, p. 140.

<sup>28</sup> Of Jeff Weiss, playing Simon Stimson, Rich, 1998, wrote, "Mr. Weiss, a hollow-eyed and spindly figure in black, haunts Grover's Corners as if he were the repository of its citizens' smashed hopes and the lifelong victim of its mean, unspoken bigotry."

<sup>29</sup> Konkle 2018, pp. 20–21, thinks the "European fella" is likely Bernard Shaw (preface to his play *Misalliance*).

of "millions" that includes us. As Cromer's staging intuited, we also become positioned in the play's limit-of.

*Our Town* is aware that ritual constrains liminal confusion imperfectly. To be sure, the wedding frames its dangers comically, even patronizingly. George tells his mother he does not want to "grow old" and Emily asks her father, "Why can't I stay for a while just as I am? Let's go away" (p. 75). Mr. Webb defuses their panic just before the ceremony. When Mrs. Webb tells us (metatheatre-1) how "cruel" it is that mothers must abandon daughters, the stage direction recommends softening humor, "*In half-amused exasperation*" (p. 72). But only half; her next line may be played to devastating effect: "The whole world's wrong, that's what's the matter." Likewise, the Stage Manager's aside, "Do I believe in it? I don't know." He summarizes life, much as Jacques' speech in *As You Like It*. We go from "the cottage, the go-cart" all the way to "the deathbed, the reading of the will." Again, Wilder asks for a "smile," against any "cynicism" when the Stage Manager says of marriage, "Once in a thousand times it's interesting" (p. 78).<sup>30</sup> However, at stake is not cynicism but tragic awareness,<sup>31</sup> which struggles with *Our Town*'s ontological vision of value and compassion in every moment.

During the wedding, the choir sings "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling" and "Bless Be the Tie That Binds" (also at the funeral). Both lyrics express earthly love recapitulating divine love, in "the fellowship of kindred minds." The script does not specify whether Simon Stimson leads the choir at the wedding; either way would be telling, contrasting his despair with the hymns or else implying he is already gone. In Act I, he rehearses "Art Thou Weary; Art Thou Languid?" and admonishes the choir, "It's a question, ladies and gentlemen, make it talk" (p. 35)—funny, unless it resonates with Simon's "peck of trouble." Dr. Gibbs tells Mrs. Gibbs, who saw Simon drunk at the rehearsal, "Some people aren't meant for small-town life" and "there's nothing we can do but just leave it alone" (p. 40). We next hear from Simon among the dead:

To move about in a cloud of ignorance [. . .]. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion or another. Now you know—that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.

MRS. GIBBS: Spiritedly. That's not the whole truth and you know it. Emily, look at that star. I forget its name. (p. 101)<sup>32</sup>

Having died in childbirth nine years after the wedding, Emily returns to relive her twelfth birthday; she is a spectator, as if *at* and *in* a play. The Stage Manager had said, "You not only live it; but you watch yourself living it" (p. 91). Emily herself now sets the scene: "There's Main Street. . . why, that's Mr. Morgan's drugstore before he changed it! [. . . .] And, *look*, there's the old white fence" (p. 93, Wilder's italics). I will speak more to this, but in terms of metatheatre-2 and limit, Emily experiences a disjunction between limit-to (the finite edge of a domain) and limit-of (that is, 'beyond' the edge). Wilder's distancing wants us to see more intensely everything and everyone in the theatre space as being superabundantly meaningful or affecting. Theatrical distance is an analog for what Emily experiences upon her return to observe the living. Her impression is that the living do not see, as she now sees, which causes anguish—"*Let's look at one another*" (p. 99)—and is something to further explore. Yet Wilder lays in the subtle, metatheatre-3 implication that the living do sometimes *see*, especially when things are set off as if on a stage, even on minor occasions like birthdays.

<sup>30</sup> According to Harrison 1983, p. 187, Wilder claimed he meant "interesting" as Gertrude Stein used it, apparently with light irony.

<sup>31</sup> See Corrigan 1961, p. 171. In denying Wilder a "religious dimension" because he lacks consistent view of redemptive ultimacy, Corrigan may have imposed an either-or criterion of propositional coherence. In being variously Platonist, humanist, Christian, and tragic Wilder has an awareness of the fragmentary that Konkle 2018, calls postmodern. On the fragmentary, see also Tracy 1999, pp. 170–81.

<sup>32</sup> From such passages and a comment by Wilder, McDonald 2018, presses the view that he portrayed human existence and the afterlife as "hellish," comparing *Our Town* with Sartre's *No Exit*," in Bryer 2018; this is probably "not the whole truth," however.

EMILY: With an effort. Mama, I can't find my blue hair ribbon anywhere.

MRS. WEBB: Just open your eyes, dear, that's all. I laid it out for you special—on the dresser, there. If it were a snake it would bite you. (p. 95)
