Our Town by Thornton Wilder is currently on Broadway again, in its fifth Broadway revival—with an all-star cast that includes Jim Parsons, Katie Holmes, Julie Halston, and many others (directed by Tony-winning director Kenny Leon). The play, which charts the life of regular denizens in a small town, has become a classic of the American theatre. Though its fate was not necessarily written in the stars when Wilder set out to write the play in 1938.
As he wrote in an essay in the Times in 1938, "I spent parts of six summers tutoring at Lake Sunape and six at the McDowell Colony at Peterboro. I took long walks through scores of upland villages. And the archaeologist's and the social historian's viewpoints began to mingle with another unremitting preoccupation which is the central theme of the play: What is the relation between the countless 'unimportant' details of our daily life, on one hand, and the great perspective of time, social history and current religious ideas on the other?" Our Town was also born of "deep admiration for those little white towns in the hills and from a deep devotion to the theatre."
Wilder had been primarily known for his fiction, earning his first Pulitzer for The Bridge of San Luis Rey, but it was Our Town that would establish him as a theatrical giant. In the 1938 review for the New York Times, Brooks Atkinson wrote, "Although Thornton Wilder is celebrated chiefly for his fiction, it will be necessary now to reckon with him as a dramatist. His Our Town, which opened at Henry Miller's last evening, is a beautifully evocative play." Atkinson also noted the "strange form" of the play.
Our Town's form was experimental for the time. The play was set in a theatre and was a play-within-a-play where actors were the denizens of a small town. It had a Stage Manager who spoke directly to the audience, even interacting with them. And while it was set in the fictional small town of Grovers Corners, it also meditated on man's relation to the universe, time, life, and death (large themes that Wilder would return to again and again in his work). The show also had minimal props and scenery—with the biggest prop being the ladders that the young couple Emily and George speak to each other through (which represented their neighboring houses). As Wilder wrote in that Times essay, in a time where film was growing, the stage has the capacity to go beyond realism. As he said, "The theatre longs to represent the symbols of things, not the things themselves...When the theatre presents to give the real thing in canvas and wood and metal it loses something of the realer thing which is its true business. Ibsen and Chekhov carried realism as far as it could go and it took all their genius to do it. Now the camera is carrying it on and is in great 'theoretical peril' of falling short of literature."
Our Town made its world premiere at McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey, January 22, 1938. It then played the Wilbur Theatre in Boston, where the audiences were cold on the play, turned off by the lack of set (according to theatre historian Louis Botto). Director and producer Jed Harris almost didn't bring the play to New York, until theatre critics Alexander Woolcott and Brooks Atkinson convinced him that the show's journey shouldn't end in Boston.
Our Town opened in New York February 4, 1938, at Henry Miller's Theatre, where it ran for a week before moving to the Morosco Theatre, where it ran until November 19, 1938—a total of 336 performances. And Wilder even played the Stage Manager for two weeks during the Broadway run (though he'd sporadically step into the role in various productions over the years). That same year, Wilder won his second Pulitzer for Our Town. The original Broadway production also starred Frank Craven as the Stage Manager, whose son John Craven played George.
For a show that's, in part, about the act of making theatre, the Broadway run wasn't without its share of stage drama. Even though Wilder intended for the play to be sparse onstage, with actors moving their own props, on Broadway, the stagehands union objected to this piece of direction—saying that only union stagehands could handle props. The union backed off after director Harris threatened to close the show and tell the press.
Since 1938, Our Town has been revived on Broadway five times, has become a staple of regional and community theatres, been produced around the world, and has been adapted twice into a film. Notable actors who have starred in Our Town include Montgomery Clift (of the 1944 Broadway revival), Henry Fonda and Margaret Hamilton (of the 1969 Broadway revival), Spalding Gray (of the 1988 Broadway revival), and Paul Newman and Jayne Atkinson (of the 2002 Broadway revival). Amazingly, the longest-running production of Our Town actually ran Off-Broadway at Barrow Street Theatre from 2009 to 2010 for 648 performances. It was directed by Tony-winning director David Cromer, who also played the Stage Manager. The play was performed with audiences on three sides of the actors, in an intimate environment, with the house lights on the entire time and the actors in modern dress. Though it was Off-Broadway, the production attracted its share of stars, with Helen Hunt and Michael Shannon among the luminaries who played the Stage Manager.
Look back at past Broadway productions of Our Town in the gallery below.
