Mark J. P. Wolf
Imaginary worlds have been around as long as storytelling itself, and have appeared in every medium that stories have, though the possibilities and peculiarities of each medium directly affect what kind of world-building can be done in it. While literature, film, television, and video games have evolved greatly over time and have increased their capabilities as venues for imaginary worlds, the theater stage has remained a more difficult place to world-build, especially when compared to other audiovisual media. Popular worlds from other media have been adapted to the stage, but far fewer worlds have originated onstage, without pre-existing incarnations of them in other media to carry the burden of exposition and introduce worlds that will already be well known to the audience by the time they appear in the theater. Thus, plays which are the origin of new, detailed worlds are few and far between.
Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning Our Town (1938), arguably one of the greatest plays of the 20th century, presents a fictional town, and perhaps no stage play attempts as much world-building as Our Town does. Nor does any play depend on world-building so much for the exploration of its theme and its philosophical outlook; the fictional town of Grover’s Corners itself is the play’s main character, as the title indicates. Though loosely based on Peterborough, New Hampshire, where Wilder wrote part of the play as a fellow of the MacDowell Colony, an artists’ retreat center, Grover’s Corners is a place all its own, with its own geography, history, and families of residents, all described and built up in the imagination of the audience during the course of the play’s performance which is usually between two and three hours on average. Before examining the world-building present in the play itself, however, we should consider the relationship between world-building and theater in general.
A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.
Imaginary worlds have appeared on stage since ancient times, such as Nephelokokkygia (Νεφελοκοκκυγία) or Cloudcuckooland from Aristophanes’s The Birds (414 bc), and throughout history, including Prospero’s Island from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), Barrie’s Neverland from Peter Pan (1904), the island in Karel Čapek’s R. U. R. (1920), and others, as well as stage versions of imaginary worlds originating in other media, like the adapted stage plays of The Wizard of Oz (1902), The Hobbit (1953, 1967, 1968, and more), and even The Lord of the Rings (1981, 1988, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2006, and more). But world-building faces several challenges on the stage; the size of the stage and the sets built on it, the life-size nature of the performers, the real-time nature of the live performance, and the fixed point of view of the audience. While the liveness and actual presence of the actors are the advantages of the stage (the “pure event” that Wilder speaks of in the above quotation), the disadvantages limiting storytelling and world-building are usually compensated for by the theatrical conventions understood by the audience that allow certain things to be implied and inferred.
World-building in literature is accomplished through description, while an audiovisual medium like theater can present sets, costumes, and props which can be seen directly by the audience, but these are limited in scope due to the limitations of the size of the stage. While some stages and sets can be very large, like the venues used for the Passion Plays at Oberammergau, Germany; Greenville, North Carolina; Eureka Springs, Arkansas; and formerly at Spearfish, South Dakota, the distance between the audience and performers still limits the scope of the presentation, and thus the size of the visible portion of the diegetic world of the story being presented. This can be expanded, however, through the use of a narrator (a stage convention going back at least to the Greek chorus in early theater), who can, as in literature, verbally describe as large a world as is needed. The possibility of description means even a small stage can be used, or a nearly empty one, leaving the world to be almost completely described by a narrator. This occurs frequently in shows with only one performer, who acts out the parts and narrates the rest to the audience, as found in stage plays like Don Berrigan’s St. John in Exile (1986), William Luce’s The Belle of Amherst (1976), and Rob Inglis’s one-man stage adaptations of The Lord of the Rings (1981). Such performances are more reliant on verbal description than stage sets, making them arguably more like radio plays or audio books; but they are able to evoke larger worlds as a result.
Likewise, the timeframe of the play’s action is not necessarily limited to the real-time length of the performance itself, since scenes can be set at different times, and span; however many years are needed, though such information must also be conveyed to the audience in some way. Thus, world-building to any degree in theater will likely depend on metatheatrical devices such as direct address, the acknowledgment of conventions, and other self-reflexive gestures that risk diminishing the very immersion that world-building strives to achieve. The incorporation and effacement of these devices, then, becomes another obstacle for the playwright who wishes to engage in world-building.
Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) takes place in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, a fictional though typical American small town, so it is not an imaginary world with an enormous size or scope or great depth of invention; it is meant to be ordinary and relatable, and relies heavily on real-world defaults, audience imagination (due to its minimalistic set and lack of scenery), and a narrator, the character of the Stage Manager. Wilder had used a Stage Manager character in his earlier, one-act plays The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden (1931) and Pullman Car Hiawatha (1932). These plays also had minimal sets, the latter used direct address as well, and at the beginning of both Pullman Car Hiawatha and Our Town, the Stage Manager gives the audience a verbal tour of the location, indicating where everything is in relation to everything else. According to Takuji Nosé,
The Stage Manager in Pullman is given both pseudo-narrator-like and pseudo-director-like status on the stage, which indicates that he carries out not only a functional role in the mediating communication system but also has one in creating a dual time scheme in the play. Whereas in one time scheme, the characters within/around “Hiawatha” convey the events on stage through their actions, in the other time scheme the Stage Manager directs the entire story through his explanations about the plot to the audience and also through his instructions to the other characters about such matters as entering/exiting and starting/stopping their performances.2
The Stage Manager of Our Town guides us through the play, tying the infrastructures together into a world, and acting as the author’s onstage world-building alter ego, even to the extent of setting out the furniture as the play opens, before he says anything. In his opening lines, he sets up the two of the three main infrastructures of the play’s imaginary world, geography (space), and history (time): “The name of the town is Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, just across the Massachusetts line: latitude 42 degrees 40 minutes; longitude 70 degrees 37 minutes. The First Act shows a day in our town. The day is May 7, 1901. The time is just before dawn”. Both of these facts, locating us precisely in space and time, turn out to have something curious and contradictory about them, as we shall see. The sections that follow will examine these two infrastructures, along with the third one, genealogy (characters), separately, so as to be able to show how each of them is used to build the world of the play.3
While most authors are vague as to the precise locations of their imaginary worlds, in order to keep them inaccessible, Wilder begins with what appears to be great precision: Grover’s Corners is in New Hampshire, “just across the Massachusetts line” at the coordinates “latitude 42 degrees 40 minutes; longitude 70 degrees 37 minutes”. These coordinates, however, are not even in the United States, but in rural Kazakhstan, in the Zhualy district in the southern part of the country. For a location in North America, the longitude coordinate should be −70° (not positive 70); but even then, 42° 40′, −70° 37′ is not on land but in the Atlantic Ocean, in Sandy Bay just north of the coast off of Rockport, Massachusetts. The precision of these coordinates gives the location the concreteness of a real place, and at the same time the coordinates could not have been checked by the audience as they sat in the theater, at least in 1938, when the play debuted. The Stage Manager then goes on to lay out the whole town for the audience, with stage directions indicating where he points:
The sky is beginning to show some streaks of light over in the East there, behind our mount’in. The morning star always gets wonderful bright the minute before it has to go, — doesn’t it? [He stares at it for a moment, then goes upstage.] Well, I’d better show you how our town lies. Up here — [That is: parallel with the back wall.] is Main Street. Way back there is the railway station; tracks go that way. Polish Town’s across the tracks, and some Canuck families. [Toward the left.] Over there is the Congregational Church; across the street’s the Presbyterian. Methodist and Unitarian are over there. Baptist is down in the holla’ by the river. Catholic Church is over beyond the tracks. Here’s the Town Hall and Post Office combined; jail’s in the basement. Bryan once made a speech from these very steps here. Along here’s a row of stores. Hitching posts and horse blocks in front of them. First automobile’s going to come along in about five years — belonged to Banker Cartwright, our richest citizen. . . lives in the big white house up on the hill. Here’s the grocery store and here’s Mr. Morgan’s drugstore. Most everybody in town manages to look into those two stores once a day. Public School’s over yonder. High School’s still farther over. Quarter of nine mornings, noontimes, and three o’clock afternoons, the hull town can hear the yelling and screaming from those schoolyards. [He approaches the table and chairs downstage right.] This is our doctor’s house, Doc Gibbs’. This is the back door.
At this point, before the action begins, the town’s geography is laid out in a series of tightening concentric circles, beginning with the coordinates situating it in the world overall, with each location or set of locations providing the context surrounding the next one presented, with the level of detail also increasing, The quote above begins with the distant mountain as a backdrop beyond everything, then moves closer to the outskirts of town “across the tracks”, gradually drawing into the more central part of town (the Town Hall and Post Office). After this description, he indicates the Gibbs’s house and yard, and the Webbs’s house and yard. After this quote, we are told what is growing in Mrs. Gibbs’s garden, “This is Mrs. Gibbs’ garden. Corn . . . peas . . . beans . . . hollyhocks . . . heliotrope . . . and a lot of burdock”, and Mrs. Webb’s garden, which is “Just like Mrs. Gibbs’, only it’s got a lot of sunflowers, too”. The concentric circles of description, growing in detail as we approach the center, focuses the audience on the area of the town being represented onstage, after we are able to imagine what lies beyond it.
After the scene at the Gibbs’s house, the Stage Manager brings out Professor Willard, who gives more geographic detail, beyond what we might expect to get about the town. Professor Willard: “Grover’s Corners lies on the old Pleistocene granite of the Appalachian range. I may say it’s some of the oldest land in the world. We’re very proud of that. A shelf of Devonian basalt crosses it with vestiges of Mesozoic shale, and some sandstone outcroppings; but that’s all more recent: two hundred, three hundred million years old. Some highly interesting fossils have been found . . . I may say: unique fossils . . . two miles out of town, in Silas Peckham’s cow pasture”. We learn about the literal bedrock upon which the town was built, giving it a figurative and literal foundation within the play.
At the beginning of Act Three, we are in the graveyard at the top of a hill, and once again the Stage Manager gives us a situating description, which builds the world around us:
You come up here, on a fine afternoon and you can see range on range of hills awful blue they are up there by Lake Sunapee and Lake Winnipesaukee . . . and way up, if you’ve got a glass, you can see the White Mountains and Mt. Washington — where North Conway and Conway is. And, of course, our favorite mountain, Mt. Monadnock, ‘s right here — and all these towns that lie around it: Jaffrey, ‘n East Jaffrey, ‘n Peterborough, ‘n Dublin; and [Then pointing down in the audience] there, quite a ways down, is Grover’s Corners.
While no stage directions are given for all the other locations (several of which are real), the only one given is for Grover’s Corners, which is literally where the audience is sitting. At this point, then, the audience can be said to be in Grover’s Corners, viewing the graveyard from the point of view of the town (although the Stage Manager also says the graveyard is “an important part of Grover’s Corners”, which would seem to include it in the town as well). Later during Act Three, the left half of the stage will become Main Street and the Webbs’s home in the scene in which Emily goes back to her 12th birthday, but the initial positioning which brings the audience’s own location into the town adds to the immersion already established in other ways.
All these details — and Our Town is constantly giving us concrete details and instances that represent universal, general things, and concepts for which we substitute our own lives’ specific details — together present a rich, full world onstage and in our imagination, which overlaps our own Primary World situation. The way these details are presented, using the concentric circles described above, along with positioning just described, has the overall effect of locating us in the center of the world, even as we are viewing it, just as Jane Crofut’s letter is addressed to The Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; the United States; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God.4 The play also uses similar world-building strategies when it comes to history and time.
On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being; the words are rising to their lips in immediate spontaneity.
Just as the beginning of Act One situates us precisely with geographical coordinates (albeit specious ones), the same opening statement does so with time, telling us “The First Act shows a day in our town. The day is May 7, 1901. The time is just before dawn”. This day, however, turns out to be problematic later; on the evening of that day, characters are commenting on how “terrible” and “wonderful” the moonlight is, at 8:30 pm; but moonrise on May 7, 1901, at latitude 42.6666, longitude −70.6166, was actually at 10:23 pm; which means the moon would not rise for almost two hours after the characters’ statements about the moonlight were made.6
Despite this error, almost all of the events of the play do fit into a coherent time structure, to the point that one can generate a timeline from all the lines which attribute specific years or even dates to events which occur or are discussed in the play. Compared to other plays, Our Town has an unusually high number of statements regarding events and their times, which is necessary here for the temporal world-building that gives Grover’s Corners its detailed history within the confines of the play’s dialog. Some of this is done very directly, as when the Stage Manager gives us a capsule history, for example, in Act One, that of Joe Crowell, Jr.: “Joe was awful bright—graduated from high school here, head of his class. So he got a scholarship to Massachusetts Tech. Graduated head of his class there, too. It was all wrote up in the Boston paper at the time. Goin’ to be a great engineer, Joe was. But the war broke out and he died in France”. Most of the time, however, years and dates are casually given in character dialog, or inferred from references to ages and past years. Putting all these references together, we can generate the following timeline of events:
200–300 million years BC = Pleistocene granite forms with shelf of Devonian basalt and Mesozoic shale and some sandstone outcroppings.
10th century AD = Earliest evidence of the Cotahotchee tribes in the area.
17th century AD = Migration occurred near the end of this century.
1670–1680 = Earliest tombstones in cemetery on the mountain are Grovers, Cartwrights, Gibbses, and Herseys.
1864 = Myrtle Webb begins cooking three meals a day for 40 years.
1871 = Howie Newsome is born around this time (he is said to be “about thirty” in 1901).
1884 = Julia Gibbs begins cooking three meals a day for 20 years. Hank Todd is on the baseball team.
1884 = George Gibbs is born.
1887, February 11 = Emily is born.
1890 = Rebecca Gibbs and Wally Webb are born.
1899, February 11 = Emily’s 12th birthday.
7:00 am = The Webbs have breakfast.
1900, June = Emily likes George a lot, but then George starts spending all his time at baseball.
1901, May 7, (Day seen in Act One)
1:30 am = Frank Gibbs gets a call to come deliver the Goruslawski twins.
“just before dawn” (sunrise was 4:29 am that day7) = Frank Gibbs returns home after delivering the twins.
5:45 am = Shorty Hawkins takes the train to Boston
7:00 am = Emily and Wally Webb are called to breakfast.
10:00 am = Wally has a test on Canada.
“late afternoon” = Children return home from school.
“evening” = Children are doing their homework. Choir practice is going on.
8:30 pm = Frank and George Gibbs have a talk, and choir practice ends. George says he is “almost 17”.
1901, June = George and Emily are juniors in high school and elected to school government positions.
1904, July 7, (Day of the wedding in Act Two)
“early morning” = It is raining.
5:45 am = Whistle heard from train to Boston. Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb make breakfast.
7:00 am = George goes to call on Emily.
12:00 pm = The wedding of George Gibbs and Emily Webb.
1906 = First automobile, belonging to banker Cartwright, comes to town.
1909 = George and Emily Gibbs’s son is born.
1910 or 1911, summer = Julia Gibbs dies.
1913, summer = (Day of the funeral in Act Three)
“afternoon” = The burial of Emily Gibbs is held in the cemetery.
1930 = Frank Gibbs dies. (At an unspecified time later, the hospital is named after him.)
2901 = The time capsule in the cornerstone of the Cartwright Bank is expected to be dug up.
Before we examine the timeline as a whole, there are a few interesting things to note about these entries. To begin with, there is an inconsistency regarding Emily’s age. In Act Three, we are given the actual date of Emily’s birthday; she was born on February 11, 1887. This agrees with the statement made on July 7, 1904, Emily’s wedding day, when Mrs. Webb says: “It came over me at breakfast this morning; there was Emily eating her breakfast as she’s done for seventeen years and now she’s going off to eat it in someone else’s house”. Both figures would imply that Emily is 17 at the time of the wedding, on July 7, 1904. George, who is in the same class in high school with Emily, says during Act One, in a scene occurring on May 7, 1901, that he is “almost 17”; thus his 17th birthday is most likely during 1901, which would mean that the year of his birth would around mid-1884, making him between two or three years older than Emily. Contradicting this, a stage direction in Act One (on the same day of May 7, 1901) says “Right, george, about sixteen, and rebecca, eleven. Left, emily and wally, same ages”. This means Emily would have been born in 1884, like George; yet in Act Three we are specifically given February 11, 1887 as Emily’s birthday. Since the date in Act Three is so precise (and matches the comment made in 1904), it seems like it would take precedence over more vague (“about sixteen”) information given only in a stage direction. If we go with the latter year of 1887 for Emily’s birthday, then this would mean, since George and Emily are juniors in high school and elected to school government positions in June of 1901, that Emily is a high school junior at the age of 14, which would put her three grades ahead of her contemporaries. In Act One, Emily does say “I’m the brightest girl in school for my age. I have a wonderful memory”, but it also seems unlikely that she is actually three grades ahead of others her age. Due to the stage direction that says “same ages” and the fact they are in the same class together, one does get the impression that Wilder intended George and Emily to be the same age, but the information he gives us implies otherwise, or is simply inconsistent.
The years of two other events are implied in the dialog; Sam Craig must have went out east in 1900 before ending up in Buffalo, because in Act Three, which is summer of 1913, he says he has been gone “over 12 years”; if he had been gone longer, one would expect him to say “over 13 years” or something like that; so it is likely that 1900 is the year he left. Likewise, Joe Stoddard says “Yes, Doc Gibbs lost his wife two-three years ago . . . about this time”, so her death must have been summer of either 1910 or 1911. Finally, there is an error in what the Stage Manager says; he claims that Emily’s 12th birthday, February 11, 1899, was a Tuesday, when in fact it was actually a Saturday.
As a whole, this collection of events, stretching across millions of years, with events ranging from the geological to the mundane, may remind one of the book-length expansion of Richard McGuire’s Here (original six-page comic strip, 1989; book, 2014), which imagines all the events to take place on a small section of land throughout the history of the world.8 Just like the concentric circles of geography are increasingly detailed as we move toward their center, the events on Our Town’s timeline extend from the prehistoric to the futuristic, with the majority of the events falling between 1899 and 1913, and especially on the days of the wedding, the funeral, and May 7, 1901, the last of which can even be laid out in a timeline on an hourly basis. Professor Willard’s description of the land is followed by other details of the Native American tribes, the first humans in the area, the migrations of later immigrants, and the tombstones of the oldest families (all of which still have descendants in town, as we discover), and so on, leading up to the turn of the 20th century, the present time of the play. We also move forward in time, with the changes the Stage Manager mentions at the start of Act Three:
This time nine years have gone by, friends — summer, 1913. Gradual changes in Grover’s Corners. Horses are getting rarer. Farmers coming into town in Fords. Everybody locks their house doors now at night. Ain’t been any burglars in town yet, but everybody’s heard about ‘em. You’d be surprised, though — on the whole, things don’t change much around here.
Of course, the play appeared in 1938, when much turn-of-the-century life was already gone, and the worsening situation in Europe threatened to change things even further. And three out of four of the last items on the timeline also involve change; the deaths of Julia Gibbs, Emily Gibbs, and Frank Gibbs. All of the details and events referred to beyond the events of the main storyline are necessary for world-building and context, especially since the town itself is the play’s main character.
Finally, the last event on the timeline, set far ahead in the year 2901, is the expected digging up of the time capsule, which will be buried in the cornerstone of the Cartwrights’s new bank in Grover’s Corners. The Stage Manager tells us about the preparations for the future discovery:
And they’ve asked a friend of mine what they should put in the cornerstone for people to dig up. . . a thousand years from now. . . . Of course, they’ve put in a copy of the New York Times and a copy of Mr. Webb’s Sentinel. . . . We're kind of interested in this because some scientific fellas have found a way of painting all that reading matter with a glue — a silicate glue — that’ll make it keep a thousand — two thousand years.
The discussion of the silicate glue that will preserve the paper, keeping it intact for perhaps as long as 2,000 years, could be seen as implying that the capsule’s contents could remain on display in a museum for another 1,000 years, bringing the timeline to an end as late as the year 3901. Finally, there is the last item mentioned that will be put into the time capsule; according to the Stage Manager, in Act One:
And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real life of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then.
So I’m going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now'll know a few simple facts about us — more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight.
See what I mean?
So — people a thousand years from now — this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. — This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.
A copy of the very play being “performed for (or read by) the audience.” is one of the written works being placed in the time capsule; interestingly, written works are the only things mentioned as the capsule’s contents. That Our Town itself will be included means that the last remaining vestiges of Grover’s Corners, apart from the time capsule itself, as an object, will be the very play the audience has now; we are, in a way, like that future audience, since that is all we presently have to represent the town. Finally, the people mentioned by the Stage Manager brings us to the third main infrastructure of imaginary worlds, which is that of characters, and the webs of relationships which give them their context.
Just as the play gives us a broad but limited background geographically and historically, we likewise get similar information on the background of the people of Grover’s Corners. Again, it is Professor Willard who establishes the deep background in Act One:
Yes . . . anthropological data: Early Amerindian stock. Cotahatchee tribes. . . no evidence before the tenth century of this era. . . hm . . . now entirely disappeared . . . possible traces in three families. Migration toward the end of the seventeenth century of English brachiocephalic blue-eyed stock. . . for the most part. Since then some Slav and Mediterranean —
We are also told that the earliest tombstones in cemetery on the mountain, from 1670 to 1680, contain the names of Grovers, Cartwrights, Gibbses, and Herseys. The first surname, Grover, provides a possible origin of the town’s own name, tying it closer to its inhabitants. The last three names are names which reappear in the present-day portions of the play, showing that the families have remained in the area; the Cartwrights are said to have had the first automobile in town, and it is also their new bank building which will contain the time capsule, so they are expected to be around for some time.
The Gibbs and Hersey families, of course, have intermarried; we find out that Hersey is the maiden name of Frank Gibbs’s wife Julia. Julia’s grandmother is mentioned as Grandma Wentworth, and another Wentworth, no doubt a descendent or relative, is said to be coming to visit the Gibbs’s house at 11:00 am on May 7, 1901. We also discover more genealogical connections throughout the play; Julia’s cousin is Hester Wilcox, Julia’s sister is Carey, and Carey’s son is Samuel Craig. Frank and Julia Gibbs, of course, have a son, George, and a daughter, Rebecca. George has an Uncle Luke, who is mentioned four times, along with the fact that George wants to work on his farm and that his uncle may one day give it over to him.
The other major family of the play is the Webb family; Charles and Myrtle Webb, who have a daughter, Emily, and a son, Wally. We are told Emily and Wally have an Aunt Carrie and an Aunt Norah, though through which of their parents they are related is not indicated. George and Emily marry, uniting the play’s main two families, and have two children of their own, neither of which is named; Emily dies after giving birth to the second one, and the first is a boy who is born four years earlier. Thus we have traced three generations of family, and a number of collateral relations as well. Apart from that, there are other indications of relationships, even to characters we may not meet; for example, Mrs. Soames mentions Mr. Soames, Mrs. Goruslawski is the mother of twins, and Joe Crowell, Jr. and his brother Si Crowell must be the sons of Joe Crowell, Sr. Likewise, the play is rich in background detail as well; over the course of the three acts, we are given no less than three dozen surnames of the town’s inhabitants: Carter, Cartwright, Corcoran, Craig, Crofut, Crowell, Ellis, Fairchild, Ferguson, Forrest, Foster, Gibbs, Goruslawski, Greenough, Grover, Gruber, Hawkins, Hersey, Huckins, Lockhart, McCarty, Morgan, Newsome, Peckham, Slocum, Soames, Stimson, Stoddard, Todd, Trowbridge, Warren, Webb, Wentworth, Wilcox, Wilkins, and Willard.9
The genealogical background places the characters in the context of families from which they have descended; George and Emily’s children can trace their roots to the Gibbs, Webb, and Hersey families, perhaps even back to those whose graves are marked by the early tombstones. The background details, and events we have witnessed, give us a familiarity that the play encourages; not only does the Stage Manager speak to us directly, but occasionally characters address the audience, including Professor Willard, Charles Webb when he answers questions posed by the faux audience members during the question-and-answer session in Act One, and Mrs. Soames at George and Emily’s wedding in Act Two, as her chatter (addressing us and her neighbors) drowns out the clergyman. By Act Three, we are seeing the graveyard from the point of view of Grover’s Corners (as mentioned earlier), and the Stage Manager shows us various graves and says “Here’s your friend, Mrs. Gibbs” and “And Mrs. Soames who enjoyed the wedding so — you remember?”, the first comment casually supposing familiarity and a relationship, while the second comment suggests a nostalgic recollection of an event from the past, both comments encouraging our emotional involvement with the play’s characters and history.
And through the intimate knowledge of the characters, along with the town’s geography and history, by the end of the play the audience will likely have established a close connection and familiarity with the town itself; indeed, it is not just “their town”, but “Our Town”. After that, it is merely another step to consider our own hometown, its history, layout, and inhabitants, the comparisons causing us to reflect on the universal and eternal qualities that the play is discussing.
Our Town was first performed January 22, 1938, it later found success on Broadway, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Thornton Wilder also had a hand in the transmedial expansion of the play and its world into film, and recognized the peculiarities of that particular medium. Audiences may be surprised to find that the 1940 film adaptation differs from the play; apart from a number of other changes, perhaps the greatest one is that Emily lives at the end. At first this may seem like typical Hollywood meddling to bring about a happy ending, but Wilder himself approved the idea. Producer Sol Lesser and Wilder discussed the film adaptation of Our Town in a series of letters. As Edward Burns and Ulla E. Dydo write in an edited collection of those letters,
Wilder was consulted by Lesser about the film script. Their letters concern problems faced in transforming a play into a film. On the major change of the added happy ending, Wilder commented to Lesser on Easter Night 1940, “In the first place, I think Emily should live. I’ve always thought so. In a movie you see the people so close that a different relation is established. In the theatre they are halfway abstractions in an allegory; in the movie they are very concrete. So insofar as the play is a generalized allegory, she dies — we die — they die; insofar as it’s concrete happening it’s not important that she die; it’s even disproportionately cruel that she die.
Let her live — the idea will be imparted anyway.”10 The changed ending still has Emily undergoing a near-death experience, allowing the graveyard scene in the play to occur, before Emily returns to the living. As Donna Kornhaber writes,
Wilder’s argument, is, in essence, based on the different properties of film and theater, on a belief that the intimacy and proximity of film forces it into the status of a “Concrete Happening” that does not offer the same allegorical possibilities as the stage. The changes to which he consented were an attempt to render Our Town anew in a manner appropriate to cinema. Wilder’s concessions did not mean he was entirely satisfied with Wood’s adaptation, although it was well received at the time and was nominated for six Academy Awards. But the playwright took from the experience a deeper appreciation of the specific strengths and capacities of filmic storytelling and a willingness to adjust his working methods to the demands of the screen, even if that meant reversing some of his most closely held principals. Wilder learned that film is a medium that must tell its stories differently and that, contra the theater, must find its power in the particular.11
The adaptation of Our Town raises other questions and issues pertaining to the adaptation of an imaginary world originating on the theatrical stage to various media; for example, the interaction with the faux audience members, which helps bring the audience into closer connection with the town, will likely be lost. So far, Our Town has been adapted to radio in 1939 and 1940; film in 1940; television in 1955, 1977, and 2003; ballet in 1994; and opera in 2009. The operatic version of the play, the 1955 television adaptation, and the stage adaptation called Grover’s Corners (1987) were all musical adaptations of the play, demonstrating its flexibility and continuing durability. The play itself continues to appear onstage, and in 1989 it won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival and Tony Award for Best Revival. In 2017, Our Town was even performed in American Sign Language and English, by the Deaf West Theater and Pasadena Playhouse in California.
While theater places its own limitations on world-building, it also provides an immediacy and presence which other media do not. Perhaps playwrights have still not fully made use of the unique world-building possibilities that the live theater stage can provide, although Our Town has arguably made the best use of them so far.12 By cleverly managing to include a large amount of world data which, while perhaps not immediately pertinent to the advancement of the storyline, is still necessary to the world-building needed to give Grover’s Corners its detail and verisimilitude, Our Town demonstrates that the stage can deliver unique imaginary worlds that become our world as we attend the performances occurring there.
1 Malcolm Cowley, Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, New York, New York: Penguin Books, 1958, page 108.
2 Takuji Nosé, “Speech System of the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Pullman Car Hiawatha”, On-line Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA), 2008, available at https://www.pala.ac.uk/uploads/2/5/1/0/25105678/nose2008.pdf.
3 Elsewhere I have written extensively about the infrastructures of imaginary worlds; see Mark J. P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, New York: Routledge, 2012.
4 There is no “Sutton County” in New Hampshire; Sutton is a town in Merrimack County, New Hampshire, which is made up of the villages of Sutton Mills, North Sutton, South Sutton, and East Sutton; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutton,_New_Hampshire.
5 Malcolm Cowley, Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, New York: Penguin Books, 1958, page 108.
6 Moonrise on May 7, 1901, according to the Keisan Online Calculator, available at https://keisan.casio.com/exec/system/1224689365.
7 Sunrise on May 7, 1901, according to the Keisan Online Calculator, available at https://keisan.casio.com/exec/system/1224686065.
8 Richard McGuire’s “Here” began as a six-page comic strip in Raw, Volume 2, #1, in 1989, and was expanded to the book-length work Here from Pantheon Books in 2014.
9 Assuming that Professor Willard and Professor Gruber, who have researched Grover’s Corners, are also residents; but the play does not specify exactly one way or the other.
10 From The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, edited by Edward Burns and Ulla E. Dydo, with William Rice, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996, page 256. Available at https://books.google.com/books?id=SHOPenESaHQC&pg=PA256&lpg=PA256&dq=%22different+relation+is+established.+In+the+theatre,+they+are+halfway+abstractions+in+an+allegory,%22&source=bl&ots=ctEokyiIXa&sig= b8Cd7b0Bm1cMTMItawIFeeuCwnc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi7-_iStpzeAhXM7VMKHctGBdsQ6AEwAXoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22different%20relation%20is%20established.%20In%20the%20theatre%2C%20they%20are%20halfway%20abstractions%20in%20an%20allegory%2C%22&f=false.
11 From Donna Kornhaber, Hitchcock’s Diegetic Imagination: Thornton Wilder, Shadow of a Doubt, and Hitchcock’s Mise-en-Scène, November 2, 2015, e-book, available at https://books.google.com/books?id=z-vZCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT12&dq=the+idea+will+be+imparted+anyway&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiGy5-RubjeAh Wuc98KHYxDBwEQ6AEIMzAC#v=onepage&q=turns%20pivotally&f=false.
12 Due to the errors regarding the chronology, it would appear Wilder did not lay out all of his events on a consistent timeline, the way world-builders would do today. Still, the timeline is fairly detailed compared to the existing imaginary world chronologies of its time, especially in theater, and holds together well enough for the purpose of the story.