Life Lessons in Everyone's Town The drama Our Town by Thornton Wilder takes place in the early 1900s in the fictitious town of Grover's Corners, a small New England community. Characters and daily life embody the heart and soul of small town life at the turn of the century, and the life lessons learned within the play's approximately two hour span leave audience members in a state of wonder about their own lives. Our Town is not your typical play. The scenery and daily lives of the residents are mostly mimed, and the Stage Manager is an actual character within the play. "Despite its abstract theatrical style, Our Town is emphatically rooted in the concrete American setting" (Konkle 137). In addition, many signifiers of American history …show more content…
In addition to taking on a few minor roles in the play, he is also the narrator. The character of the Stage Manager as a narrator serves as a "chorus" who portrays the town's characters not only as personalities, but according to Castellitto, also "as forces" (Castellitto 2). The Stage Manager provides the omniscient point of view. He is one who knows what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen in the future (Konkle 142). For example, at the beginning of the play, the Stage Manager predicts the deaths of three characters, and two of them are major (Konkle 135). According to Shuman, "It is this omniscience that links him with the dead, suggesting that the consciousness of death is only one way in which human kind knows eternity," and it is because of the Stage Manager that Grover's Corners is EVERY town(Shuman …show more content…
Life goes on. Emily dies, but her children live. The cemetery and the words spoken by the dead in Act III force play goers to see life for what it is--fleeting and transient, while still leaving them with a since of hope for the future and a reverence for the beauty of life. However, as Konkle states, "... it is ironic that the realization of how wonderful life is comes only in viewing Emily's death, after life has been lost" (Konkle 144). Time and again, through statements made by the Stage Manager, the cycle of life, the evolution of society, and lessons learned along the way are emphasized. His interruptions throughout the play provide insight into key themes. For example, statements testifying to progress on various levels of experience are more plentiful, though understated for the most part as with everything else in the play. References to a new hospital, the town's population growth, the increase in the value of antique furniture, patented farm equipment, and the Ford's adaptation to farm work suggest "subtle, even mundane advances; nevertheless, they do represent improvements in the quality of life" (Konkle
Mark Lambeck uses the drama’s setting to relate Intervention to the audience. Specifically, he uses a vague yet understandable modern time. An audience can relate knowing they could experience the same thing on any given day. The location of the play is also a place an audience could easily find themselves. It is vague place that could represent almost anywhere, perhaps in where the audience is. In the current world, one could easily find themselves walking down the street on their cell phone. The characters are constant...
Once Emily has died, the play continues into the afterlife in Heaven. Here she meets the other citizens of Grover’s Corners who have passed away. A right to being in Heaven is that you can go back to your life on Earth and not only relive it, but rewatch it knowing what the future brings. Even with push back from her companions in Heaven, Emily decides to relive her twelfth birthday.
Wilder’s show of the cycle of life in Our Town exemplifies the significance of life’s repetition. In Act I, the beginning of life’s cycle is shown when Dr. Gibbs returns home from delivering twins. In the act of “Love and Marriage,” which follows three years later, the Stage Manager describes children growing up and learning to talk, and people who used to be athletic are finding that they cannot do what they used to do. He goes on by saying that most young people found that they were ready to get married, and start their families. So was true with George Gibbs and Emily Webb. They moved on from being children and were now learning how to be adults. In Act III, which is placed nine years afte...
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town both explore the fulfillment of life. Emily and Willy Loman fail to take advantage of their lives because they have the wrong priorities and do not take the time appreciate what they already have. Willy focuses solely on achieving his dreams of success as a salesman and helping Biff become a great man, resulting in him ignoring his family, declining status in society, and reality, leading to his demise. He never realizes what he has lost by chasing after inconceivable dreams; however, Wilder’s Emily reflects on her life after she dies and begins to understand that her lack of appreciation for the little moments took away from the fullness of her life. Even though Wilder and Miller tell two unique stories, they use similar methods to show their thoughts on living and essentially convey the same message about how dreams can ruin people and how not appreciating the little things takes away from the quality of life.
Each character, in some capacity, is learning something new about themselves. Whether it be new views, new feelings, newfound confidence, or a new realization of past events, each character involved in the play realizes something view-altering by the end of the play. Bonny is realizing that she is growing up and discovering how to deal with boys, and to lie to her parents; Elsie realizes that she doesn’t need her father for everything, and eventually overcomes her fear of driving on her own; Grace is discovering that she must let her children think for themselves at times, and that she must let Charlie choose what he wants to do; and Charlie, of course, is discovering that there are more ways to think than the status quo that society presents. Each character obviously goes through very different struggles throughout the play, but in the end, they all result in realizing something about themselves they didn’t at the beginning of the
Our Town is social satire in that it portrays that a small town like Grover’s Corners is like every other small town. Those families are all the same in small towns; they go to school and when they graduate they get married and have kids. The males get jobs and the women take care of the house and children. Another way of it’s a social satire is through their use of minimal scenery and pantomimed actions; the paperboy throws imaginary newspapers, the children pretend to eat breakfast. This then forces each person in the audience to imagine objects that do not really exist. The imaginary quality of these objects makes the play more universal, and make the members of the audience use their own sense of imagination to envision the props in their own way. It really allows the audience to be involved and feel included in the production. This perhaps could be one of the main reasons this play was such a success with a lot of people in general. By doing some research on the play I found a number of scholars and reviewers that have criticized the homogeneity of Grover’s Corners, a largely white, Protestant town. Our Town has been derided as an escapist fantasy that ignores the realities of the racism, sexism, and economic hardship that defined American life during Wilder’s era and that continue, to some degree, to define American life
In what way is Wilder’s Our Town is an American Dream narrative because the characters in the play all portray actions of what is considered “normal” activities of the American people. For example, Mr. Webb talks about Emily and George’s wedding. He mentions that at all weddings women have the floor and are the main focus, that’s the way of a classic American wedding goes. Always have been and always will. As he says to George “All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder making sure that the knot’s tied in a mighty public way,” (59). Our Town exposed the buried secrets, hypocrisy, and oppression lurking beneath the surface of American small town life. Throughout the play Wilder presents a far more celebratory picture of a small town,
Newly dead, Emily was able to look down on Grover’s Corners from a different perspective. From her new perspective, she realized that the lives of the living were much different than the lives of the dead. The stage manager explained “the dead don’t stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they lose hold of the earth… and the ambitions they had… and the pleasures they had… and the things they suffered… and the people they loved…” (Wilder, 88). Since the dead were capable of looking over Grover’s Corners, they saw what the living could not. They did not stay interested in the living because it pained them to watch how ignorant they were. After enlightenment, the dead had no reason to hold onto their old lives. While looking down on Grover’s Corners, Emily was quickly able to tell that the live residents were living in a false reality, and asked the other dead “Live people don’t understand, do they?” (Wilder, 96). What the living did not understand was how lucky they were to be alive. They took everything for granted because they had no opportunity to look at their lives from a different perspective, as the dead had. After further examination, Emily concluded that “They’re sort of shut up in little boxes, aren’t they?” (Wilder, 96). Although Emily was not referring to the people of Grover’s
Have you ever stopped to realize life for what it truly means? Every day we go about our lives taking things for granted without even realizing the value in every moment we are given. Playwright Thornton Wilder portrays this message in the play Our Town and he does it using unorthodox theatrical approaches. By using the Stage Manager to break the “fourth-wall”, Wilder is able to have a stronger impact on those who are listening. Wilder also creates not only a seemingly boring town, but also extremely bland lives of flat characters. By doing this, he is able to emphasize events such as marriage, birth, and death with characters Emily Webb and George Gibbs. Through them, Wilder intentionally shows how beautiful life itself is, especially the seemingly insignificant moments. He uses the technique of manipulating time by rushing through each act as well as including
...usual life such as Emily who turned into a murderer, killing her own boyfriend and Louise Mallard dead after living her "real life" for one hour, feels her feeling free from repression during her husband death and finally died of heart disease when she knew that her husband is alive.
The theme of the play has to do with the way that life is an endless cycle. You're born, you have some happy times, you have some bad times, and then you die. As the years pass by, everything seems to change. But all in all there is little change. The sun always rises in the early morning, and sets in the evening. The seasons always rotate like they always have. The birds are always chirping. And there is always somebody that has life a little bit worse than your own.
Our Town is a play that tells the seemingly insignificant story of all small town in New Hampshire called Grover’s Corners. The story focuses on two families of the town, the Gibbs and the Webbs, and how they live their lives. The writer of Our Town, Thornton Wilder, has said “The play is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.” Wilder’s attempt is exceptionally successful and conveys an important message about the significance of the smallest events in life.
In this play Everyman makes a point and big emphasis that death is inevitable to every human being. This play is simply in its morality and in its story. You shouldn’t be so keen on all the material things in life and forget the purpose of your life. Your personal pleasures are merely transitory, but the eternal truth of life is that death is imminent and is eternal. It is the bitter truth that everyone has to accept it. If you are born you will die one day. Science does not believe in religion. But one day Science will also end in Religion. Everyone should live their life fearful of God and accept Christ as their Savior.
the role of a narrator. One role he takes on in the play is the voice
Then when Emily was two the narrator raise enough money to put Emily in nursery school. The climax of the story is that when Emily performs a comedy act on the stage and suddenly everyone like her especially her mother, or the narrator and the narrator's said that she does not let her go, but has no choice to let her go. Eventually, the narrator got remarried and the narrator was most of her time in the hospital, so she could deliver her second child named Susan, but most of the time Emily was left alone because she has the illness that caused her not see her mother or Susan. After all, that happens the sad part was that after she was sick she did not recover as easily they had hope like having terrible nightmares and the narrator wanted to comfort Emily but she could not because she had trouble to stop moving, and now Emily realizes that she does not want the comfort of her