Reading Our Town and Recalibrating --

There's something quaint but also timeless about reading the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder with a bunch of teenagers. The dialogue and some of the situations are a little dated, but mostly, the play hits home time and again. Where I teach is a very small town in the northern part of New Hampshire; the play is set in the southern part of the state, but the size of the town, the gossip, the daily concerns of the characters are all very familiar to us today. 

We finished Act I yesterday, and my question to the class was simply: Why would anyone write a play about pretty average people doing pretty average things? 

The answer is actually embedded in the monologue about the time capsule that the Stage Manager delivers, which focuses on how we only know about kings and contracts from history, and he wants to put a copy of the play in the box alongside the newspapers and Shakespeare. But the better, deeper answer almost always comes from the kids themselves, something about how they are just like the characters, that their lives are made up of the simple things, not the huge moments. I went on to give them a little hint, as well, that once the author has us hooked, has us sympathetic for these characters because they and their lives are just like ours, then, as the play progresses, we will also see ourselves in the story as it unfolds. 

The ending is, as most endings, somewhat sobering and introspective. It always makes me rethink how I'm going through my days. It is a conversation between Emily and the Stage Manager:

Emily: I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. All that was going on in life, and we never noticed. Take me back – up the hill – to my grave.

But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners. Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking. And Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths. And sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?

Stage Manager: No. The saints and poets, maybe they do some.

Emily: I’m ready to go back. I should have listened to you. That’s all human beings are! Just blind people.

We don't realize that our lives are really made up of tripping over shoes and stepping on toys, scraping food off plates, and turning shirts right-side out after they are washed. We grumble about the little things --I know I do-- but really, those are the building blocks to a life worth living.

Have a good day,

C