'Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?'

Thornton Wilder | Our Town

Amongst a host of well-meaning playwrights of his day and age, who raved and revelled on ‘realism mode’ to their craft, Thornton Wilder sought to charter course on a different terrain altogether. ‘When the rest of my generation went to Paris, I went to Rome!’ once admitted Wilder himself, on his ‘I took the road less travelled’ enterprise!

Speaks volumes to his commitment and zeal for innovation and experimentation on stage. And for a reason at that!

Well! One particular aspect of theatre that he detested to the core was the superficial realism on stage – which he sincerely felt - had gotten itself in the way of connecting with his audience! Hence Wilder’s plays offer us all a peek into all kinds of experimental staging, that was quite new to the American playgoing public! And by breaking free from the confines and the strictures of realism, Wilder sought to break bounds and step into the expressionistic and symbolic modes to help connect with his audience much better!

To this end, he dispensed with the excessive use of props and scenery on stage, and went ahead boldly, transgressing all stagecraft and stage conventions of his day.

This new benchmark that he had set for his plays, enlivened the spirits of his audience, who felt they could connect better with his themes! Hence his techniques soon became a rage amongst a host of his contemporaries and successive playwrights, who wallowed with such elan on these newy modes that sought to redefine theatre of their time and clime!

And this benchmark was quite impactful and impressive on any many counts!

Wilder practised using the most minimal props on stage, without any scenery, festoons or curtains whatsoever, as he had always felt that, these devices propelled a disconnect between the artist and their audience! To make do the lacuna, Wilder created a new character on stage, called the Stage Manager, whose role and responsibility was to directly address the audience on a host of parameters that concern the play.

His seminal play titled, Our Town is best ensample unto this, his credo!

Our Town, then, is an unconventional play of sorts, written way back in the 1930s, that takes place in a small fictional town of Grover’s Corner.  (we’d already discussed this play on this, our blog, albeit on a different theme titled, ‘Beauty in Literature’, almost a year back!)

It is a meta-theatrical play of a different ballgame altogether, wherein the main character is the Stage Manager who is a kinda narrator to the play! Hence the onus is on him to describe to his audience, the past and the future vis-à-vis the present!

Well, critics have pointed out that, Wilder could’ve possibly dispensed with excessive reliance on stagecraft akin to the Brechtian types, as he might have considered them a deterrent to the effectiveness of the message! The more the props and stagecraft, the more the distractions from the take-home message, he would’ve surmised! 

Added, this bare-minimum stage, he felt, would help the audience in realizing the stark truth that the world on the stage is not a real one at all! One reason why Wilder here swaps into a host of metatheatrical devices, by whose means, he not only makes the stage manager address the audience directly, but also takes questions from them!

Now over to Our Town!

Our Town is so unique in its descriptions of what ordinary people do in their everyday lives. Emily, especially, is of Wilder’s own heart and soul! Well, Emily so wishes to go back to the good ol’ past, and relive those nostalgic moments of yore yet again! But Mrs. Gibbs warns her not to go back to her past! She further tells her that it’s better to forget those past vignettes of life, and rather look ahead to life. But Emily sticks to her stand, and assures her that she’d choose to relive a happy day, and decides to pick her twelfth birthday.

Now, the Stage Manager promptly sets the scene back in time, down the decades, to 11 February, 1899. Emily now relives her twelfth birthday. She gazes at the town as it once used to be. She hears her mother’s voice calling her down to breakfast and is so fascinated at how young she looks, back then. Her father now walks into the house…. No spoilers again. So, life moves ahead so quickly, and people don’t even seem to realize this fact.

Emily now proceeds to ask the Stage Manager if human beings ever seem to realize the true meaning of life while they actually live it! He replies that, perhaps some saints or poets do. Mr. Stimson then observes that, she has learned that people go through life in utmost ignorance, blind to what’s really important – the little beautiful things in life!

Emily Webb’s final speech in the graveyard emphasizes the beauty of these mundane elements of life!

The play has become such a rage all around the world today, that by given approximates, at least one performance of this play is happening at any given point of time, somewhere around the world, every other day of the year!

Finally, to sum up this little post, in Wilder’s own words,

A play is what takes place. A novel is what one person tells us took place. So if you have something to tell us, write a novel. If you have something to show us, write a play.

And again, 

Literature has always more resembled a torch race than a furious dispute among heirs. The theatre has lagged behind the other arts in finding the “new way” to express how men and women think and feel in our time. I am not one of the new dramatists we are looking for. I wish I were. I hope I have played a part in preparing the way for them. I am not an innovator but a rediscoverer of forgotten goods and I hope a remover of obtrusive bric-a-brac!

How much he true-proves on this credo!

As eminent critic Scupin Richards once said, 

“Indeed, such-much is the charm! And such-much the sway!
Of Thornton Wilder, and this, his play!” 

image: ctxlivetheatredotcom, voronkova@gabriella

A few excerpts for this post on Thorton have been culled out from off our past post on Thorton Wilder.