In the play Our Town, by Thornton Wilder, the Stage Manager is an important, but also confusing character. This character is shown to be almost omniscient and is also displayed as almost god-like character. He inserts himself into the play by talking directly to the characters and also becoming some of the characters such as the minister and the owner of the drugstore. He is portrayed as very wise especially when talking about the character’s deaths and when talking to the people in the afterlife. The Stage Manager is meant to be limited omniscient god-like character. This is shown through the way he knows of the characters deaths, the way he plays with time, and the way he interacts with characters both dead and alive.
In the play the
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Stage Manager has the uncanny knowledge of the deaths of the characters. This knowledge is shown when he says, “Want to tell you something about that boy Joe Crowell there… Goin' to be a great engineer, Joe was, But the war broke out and he died in France.-All that education for nothing.” This leads people to believe he is all-knowing, however this is not the case. He is a strange character because he knows many things, yet he asks the characters questions which shows that he doesn’t know every single thing. An example of his limited omniscience is when he asks””. Throughout the whole play he walks the line between human and omniscient because he will at one point be telling of a characters death and then become a character himself. The Stage Manager is strange because he is able to be the narrator of the play and a character at the same time.
As the narrator he is able to skip ahead in time which is another way he can be looked at as a god-like character. The Stage Manager starts out skipping ahead a couple of hours, but at the end he is able to go back and forth. At one point he takes Emily 14 years into the past. He skips through time as though it has no meaning to him, and he skips forward years inconsequentially. The Stage Manager seems like he is only trying to show us enough to get his point across because he doesn’t make us learn everything that goes on in their town. The stage manager treats time in this play like it is trivial even though in the end one of the play’s messages is how people don’t use their time on Earth …show more content…
wisely. The last way that The Stage Manager is shown to be different than an average human is the way that he interacts with the living and the dead in Act III.
During Act III The Stage Manager is shown with the dead people and he even talks to them. This is shown when he answers Emily’s question about if anyone truly enjoys their life by saying, “No. (Pause)The saints and poets, maybe-they do some.” He is the one who tells Emily what will happen to her now and shows her an amazing ability that he has. He takes Emily back to the world of the living, specifically back to her 12th birthday which was 14 years in the past. He is peculiar in the sense that he doesn’t warn Emily about reliving her past like the others, but just says, “You not only live it; but you watch yourself living it.” This makes it seem like he has gone through this with countless other people making him appear as a sort of reaper type character. He seamlessly transverses the barrier between the living and the dead which is just another example of some of his ominous powers. The way he is able to interact with both the living and dead makes it certain that he is something more than a human and it is obvious he has more knowledge of the afterlife than the other people. The Stage Manager is obviously different from the other characters, but who he really is can be interpreted differently by any audience member or
reader. The Stage Manager from the first few pages is already set apart from the other characters as special. As the play progresses The Stage Manager reveals more of his knowledge and power. The way that he knows of the future makes us think he is omniscient, yet he begins to ask characters questions and it shows us that he doesn’t really know everything. This makes him stand out, and makes us guess the whole time about who he really is.
The theme of this play is centered around time; the value of the little time we have been given and how that time should be used to live for what is right and what truly matters.
The characters address the audience; the fast movement from scene to scene juxtaposing past and present and prevents us from identifying with particular characters, forcing us to assess their points of view; there are few characters who fail to repel us, as they display truly human complexity and fallibility. That fallibility is usually associated with greed and a ruthless disregard for the needs of others. Emotional needs are rarely acknowledged by those most concerned with taking what they maintain is theirs, and this confusion of feeling and finance contributes to the play's ultimate bleak mood.
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.
Most people that work in theatre have a pretty good idea of what a stage manager does during rehearsals - at least, the things that can be seen. We take blocking notes, cue lines, keep track of the time, coordinate presets and scene changes, answer the questions, and solve the problems. Yet, there are so many things a stage manager does, so many balls constantly being juggled, that many elements of the stage manager’s job go unnoticed. So, in honor of the unseen, here is a sampling of some tasks a stage manager completes before rehearsal. Early in our morning, we check our phone.
This makes it even more suspicious. Suspense is created by the fact that he breaks up the family party and takes all the joy and excitement away. Somehow he knows it all, what the truth is and what a lie is. His character is constant throughout the play and he never changes. He is looked at as God as he some how points the finger at their conscience "One Eva smith has gone but there are millions and millions and millions of Eva smiths and john smiths still left with us.
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
Finally, Act three is the end of the day when Emily is dead and goes back for her twelfth birthday. The stage directions were simple and plain so you could use your imagination, kind of like a book. The stage manager was also a character in this play.
During Act II, George and Emily, who are lovers, have a flashback to when Emily told George how she felt about him and how he has changed. The flashback takes place at Morgan’s drugstore. The two discuss their feelings toward each other while eating strawberry ice cream sodas. George also bring up the topic of him going away to agriculture college and he asks Emily to write to him when he is gone. Emily does not want him to leave Grover’s Corner because she knows it cause them to disconnect. George says, “I think that once you’ve found a person that you’re very fond of...I mean a person who’s fond of you, too, and likes you enough to be interested in your character…” (Wilder 71). What George is trying to say here is that he’s in love with Emily and he likes her for her. Later in Act III, Emily, who is now deceased, goes back to her 12th to say goodbye to all the things she left behind. She tried to tell her mom about what happened and how they used to be happy but her mom can not hear her because she is a spirit. Emily sadly says, “ I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back---up the hill---to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look” (Wilder 108). Here, Emily is regretting living life without a purpose nor knowing the importance of appreciation of the simpler things in life. These references are examples of manipulation of time because they show how things should have been instead of how they actually were. Wilder uses Emily and George’s flashback at Morgan’s Drugstore to show the reader to never lose site of your true love and appreciate the fact that their willingness to be apart of your life. Wilder uses Emily going back to her 12th birthday as a device to convey the importance of life while she regrets not appreciating the small things in
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.
At the rear of the stage there is a window and through it the sun streams “as the play progresses it fades imperceptibly until, at the end, the room is almost in complete darkness.” Apart from the obvious reason, which would be the course of a day, the sun, here, is a symbol of glory, success and faith. We can interpret it by saying that at the beginning of the play, when Paul and Sylvia are still young, “at twenty-odd years of age”, they still have hopes of a better future. It is shown through Paul’s ambition of working and studying law to guarantee a better living, and Sylvia’s intentions of marrying and abandoning her family. As the time goes we notice only disappointments and attempts to change their lives.
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.
That's villainous and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it" (3.2.44-47). He speaks to the actors in the play as to instruct how they should play real events. In MND the play within a play happens in the last act of the story. Because of this it does not move the plot forward.
The actors would pretend to be holding items that weren’t actually there to allow the audience to imagine their own props. This allowed for a lot of variety within the audience and a lot of different emotions. During some of the scenes in Act III, there was blue lighting on the graveyard. This let the mood become very low, sad, and almost ery, which worked perfectly for what Thornton Wilder was trying to portray. The sound effects for this play weren’t very good.
On Wednesday, October 28, my class and I attended a play called “Our Town” written by Thornton Wilder. It was shown at the Northern Stage in White River Junction, VT. I think the main message of this play is that everything changes gradually. Throughout the play, we are reminded that nothing is permanent. At the beginning of each act, the stage manager reveals the subtle changes that take place over time. The population of Grover’s Corner grows. Cars become commonplace while horses are used less and less. The adolescent characters in Act One are married during Act Two. During Act Three, when Emily Webb is laid to rest, Thornton Wilder reminds us that our lives on Earth are temporary. The Stage Manager says that there is “something eternal,” and that something is related to human beings. However, even in death, the characters change as their spirits slowly let go of their memories and identities.