Our Town :: essays research papers

Our Town, by Thornton Wilder, is an American exemplary, communicating with warmth and silliness the interminable realities of human presence. It is a gladdening, sympathetic look around then before the Great Wars; before our guiltlessness was lost until the end of time. From the hour of its first exhibitions in 1938, it has kept on being viewed as perhaps the best portrayal of life in America and of the lavishness of our entertainment business world. For a considerable length of time it has stayed a milestone of showy craftsmanship and a caring image of American life. Victor of the Pulitzer Prize, Our Town portrays tenderness set against a foundation of hundreds of years of time, social history, and strict thoughts. As the Stage Manager (who capacities as a Greek chorale in the show) says: "This is how we were in our growing-up and in our wedding and in our doctoring and in our living and in our dying." Our Town is set in 1901 in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, where the Gibbses and the Webbs are neighbors. During their youth George Gibbs and Emily Webb are companions and their lives are inseparably woven together as neighbors' lives are probably going to be. Yet, as they develop more seasoned they go into a condition of sentimental (and humiliating) enthusiasm for each other. George proposes to Emily in the medication store over a frozen yogurt pop, and they are hitched with all the great people of Grover's Corners in participation. Yet, George and Emily's joy is fleeting. Emily passes on in labor and is covered in the town's burial ground on a blustery, troubling day. There she is brought together with those companions and neighbors who have kicked the bucket before her, and who assist her with adapting herself to her new presence. In one of the most crucial scenes in present day theater, the harmony and calm of death, which can never be comprehended by the living, is depicted. Our Town isn't just about Emily and George and, to be sure, isn't just about a humble community in northern New England a hundred years back. Our Town is a play about what we (and Thornton Wilder) thought America and Americans were. As we are going to take a head-long jump into the following century we are constrained, not exclusively to look forward to what we may turn out to be, yet to turn and glance back at what permitted us to show up at this edge of the new thousand years.