Summary

The stage is empty, without curtain or scenery. As the audience settles into their seats, the Stage Manager enters and begins placing some chairs downstage, to signify the Webb and Gibbs kitchens. When the house lights have gone down, the Stage Manager introduces the play, acknowledging the author and the cast and crew. He begins to describe Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, gesturing at the empty walls and the wings as he points out Main Street and the cemetery. He also points out the two households with which we will be principally concerned - that of the town doctor, Dr. Gibbs, and that of the local newspaper editor, Mr. Webb. At dawn, Doc Gibbs returns from delivering twins and Mrs. Gibbs comes downstairs to prepare breakfast. The Stage Manager mentions the manner in which Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs will eventually die.

Actors begin to appear, pantomiming their daily routine as the Stage Manager briefly sketches their biographies. Mrs. Gibbs lights the fire in her stove, and Mrs. Webb puts on her apron - most props mentioned are imaginary, and most actions are performed in pantomime. A young boy, Joe Crowell, Jr., throws imaginary newspapers until Dr. Gibbs interrupts him with a report of the new twins. The boy reports in turn that his schoolteacher is getting married, and says that he thinks "if a person starts out to be a teacher, she ought to stay one." The pleasantries run their course, and the Stage Manger tells us that the paper boy later won a scholarship to MIT, and was going to be a great engineer, but he was killed in France during the war (as the play was written in 1938, the war in question was World War I). "All that education for nothing," the Stage Manager says.

Each of the main families-the Webbs and the Gibbs'-begin their morning routines, which are similar. The dialog cuts in and out between the neighboring kitchens as we hear mundane details about the children's schoolwork, and the adults' daily routines. For instance, Emily proclaims that she's the brightest girl in school and George requests a raise in his allowance. The children finish their breakfasts and run off to school. Mrs. Gibbs feeds the chickens in the yard, and strikes up a commonplace conversation with Mrs. Webb while she strings beans next door. Mrs. Gibbs remarks that she has a chance to sell her grandmother's highboy (a tall chest of drawers) for a good price, and that she would like to use the money to finance a European vacation if she could only convince Dr. Gibbs to go. The doctor, for his part, isn't interested in travel, except for his regular visits to the battlefields of the Civil War, and thinks that "it might make him discontented with Grover's Corners to go traipsin' about Europe." But Mrs. Gibbs feels that "once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to."

The Stage Manager enters and cuts off the conversation, excusing Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb and sending them off stage. The Stage Manager introduces two experts to provide some facts about the town. Professor Willard from the State University discusses the geological composition of their area of New Hampshire, also noting the population as 2,640, which the Stage Manager ups to 2,642, including the twins born that morning. The other expert, Mr. Webb, provides a social and political report. The town is mostly Republican and mostly Protestant, with a smattering of Democrats and Catholics, and the rest "indifferent" on both counts. Mr. Webb's editorial assessment of Grover's Corners is that it is a "very ordinary town... little better behaved than most. Probably a lot duller." Ninety percent of the young people stay in town to raise their families, he adds. The Stage Manager invites questions from the audience, and Mr. Webb fields questions about the town's drinking habits (some, but not a big deal), its sense of social injustice (people know rich from poor, but let those who can care for themselves do so), and its culture (mostly interested in birds and sunrises).

We rejoin the day at hand to see Emily walk home with George. He admires her talent for schoolwork, and asks if she would give him hints on some problems when he is stuck; she agrees. At home, Emily asks her mother whether she is pretty, to which her mother replies that Emily is "pretty enough for all normal purposes." The Stage Manager interrupts again and mentions a time capsule that the town intends to put in the cornerstone of the new bank in Grover's Corners; the play, Our Town, will go in the capsule as a record of "our growing up and our marrying and our living and our dying."

George and Emily do their homework in their opposite houses-their second-story rooms represented by ladders-while the town choir rehearses "Blessed be the tie that binds." George gazes at Emily as she gazes at the moon. Further everyday details follow before the choristers return from rehearsal. Mrs. Gibbs, Mrs. Webb and Mrs. Soames gossip about the choir director, Simon Stimson, who was drunk at rehearsal, a habitual happening. Dr. Gibbs comments on Mr. Stimson's alcoholism, saying, "I don't know how that'll end, but there's nothing we can do but leave it alone." Mrs. Gibbs tries to convince her husband to take a European trip, but he won't hear of it.

After another short interruption by the Stage Manager, Rebecca tells George about a letter her friend received, which included in its address line some unnecessarily detailed directions, finishing with "the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God... and the postman brought it just the same." Then the Stage Manager announces that the first act has ended, and the audience "can go and smoke now, those that smoke."

Analysis

The most remarkable thing about Our Town is how unremarkable its events are. There is no scenery, no props or costumes to ground the action in a real time or place-Grover's Corners might be anywhere, in any state of the Union. The Stage Manager tells us the day is May 7, 1901, but that doesn't matter much -national events are hardly mentioned (aside from the paperboy's coming death in World War I), technological advances have no bearing on the characters, and the only connection to real historical figures is an aside that "[William Jennings] Bryan once spoke there."

Yet this impression of complete unspecificity of time and place comes with an almost comical reverence for its factual specificity. The play is obsessed with statistics. We are told the latitude and longitude of Grover's Corners to the minute; a professor is introduced to inform the audience about the geological makeup of the area and several versions of the official population. The Stage Manager points out various features of the landscape and the town, gesturing at the bare walls. Yet this specificity serves, paradoxically, to further highlight the anonymity of Grover's Corners. There is no personality in numbers, however factual they are presented to be. Grover's Corners is thus a town concocted completely without a distinct cultural identity-it is bland to the point of (literal) invisibility, consisting only in human clichés and bare statistics, each equally barren of human color.

Wilder purposefully de-personalizes the citizens of Grover's Corners in order to present them as blank slates. The audience is meant to see themselves in Emily and George, and their own parents in the Webbs and Gibbs'. The very title of the play itself emphasizes inclusivity - not my town, or your town, but our town. The events of the narrative are the sort of things that happen to almost everyone, and the characters don't even react in unique ways. This makes the basic moral of the story somewhat ironic - your life isn't very special, in the grand scheme of things, so celebrate and cherish every moment of it, because it's all you've got. Wilder, by giving us a sort of bare template for human interaction, invites us to fill out the drama with our own memories and experiences-to act, as it were, within the play he is staging.

Wilder develops this invitation to recognize our role within these familiar patterns of human life on a historical level as well. In his unpublished preface to Our Town, Wilder wrote that since visiting ancient archeological sites in Rome, he often tried to look at the world around him through the eyes of a future civilization. "Babylon once had two million people in it," the Stage Manager says in his monologue halfway through the first act, "and all we know about 'em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney, -- same as here." (Never mind that there were no chimneys in Babylon.) Thus there is a commonality of human experience-from Babylon to Grover's Corners-which Our Town tries both to enact and to remember, as it were.

The clearest example of Our Town's role as a collective memory-or, more specifically, as a template for human memory-is when the Stage Manager explains that a copy of Our Town will be placed in the time capsule in the cornerstone of the new Grover's Corners bank, so that in a thousand years it will be known that "this is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying." This record will not emphasize the uniqueness of Grover's Corner's inhabitants: it will emphasize their similarity. The hypothetical audience of a thousand years hence will assumedly gain the same insight from the play that we do today-or that audiences in the 1930's did: that human life is remarkably consistent throughout all space and time. The same coordinates-growing up, marrying, dying-are common to nearly every human culture, and will probably continue to be so as long as there are human cultures.

The Stage Manager is essential to the sense of human continuity in the play. He exists at once without the play and without; at once inside and outside of its action. To some degree, his role is not new to theater-the ancient Greek chorus, for instance, provides an instance of a link between players and audience at the dawn of acting. However, the extent to which he acknowledges the play's constructedness-even to the point of beginning with a nod to the author-was quite experimental for the time. In his actions, the Stage Manager is a sort of a cross between a representation of the author (Thornton Wilder even played the Stage Manager himself for a stint in the first run of the play) and a plainspoken god figure: he foresees and controls the histories of his characters (and, it is suggested, of all humanity), to the extent of authoring them-he orders them offstage in order to talk to the audience alone, much like an author interposes exits in his manuscript-which both playwright and god in fact do. If he is in some way a god-or at least a representative of God-he is the hands-off sort (much like the townsfolk themselves in this way) letting the pre-ordained course of fate take its path, not intruding except to momentarily freeze the action-without ever altering it-or to provide a deeper look at the events unfolding-without ever changing them.

Indeed, Grover's Corners is a place of continuity and repetition, a town with an unchanging life cycle. The names on the gravestones in the cemetery are the "same names as are around here now." Juxtaposed with Dr. Gibbs' delivery of twins is the Stage Manager's presentation of the future deaths of Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs-two lives for two deaths. The only thing "serious goin' on in the world," according to the newsboy Joe, is that his schoolteacher is getting married, and in the context of Our Town this is a serious event - a wedding marks the passage of time, the advance of a life from one stage to the next. The milkman's horse Bessie, on the other hand, cannot understand and adjust to change, and resists changes to the milk route. Like the phases of the moon, which plays such a major role in the First Act, human life is a sequence of barely changing gestures, beginning in life and ending in death, with only the minutest differences from individual to individual.

Speaking of the moon, its nighttime light serves to unify the vignettes of the First Act's closing scenes: the last section of the act begins with the singing of the hymn "Blessed Be the Tie That Binds," and the tie that binds the characters in the scene is, in many ways, the moon. The choristers walk home together in moonlight "as bright as day," their gossip serving to bring together the concerns of different members of the town community. Elsewhere, Emily is romantically distracted from her homework by the "terrible" moonlight; her parents, too, are susceptible, taking a stroll to "smell the heliotrope in the moonlight." And young Rebecca imagines the moon closing in on the earth, then soliloquizes that the moon is shining on "half the whole world," uniting humanity by the common sight. The moon in this scene illustrates the play's conceit that those things that are common to all humanity (the moon, or, life and love and death) make us all members of the same human community - it's how we differently experience these common elements that gives us each our unique experience.

Summary

The Stage Manager welcomes the returned audience by saying that three years have passed, and "the sun's come up over a thousand times." Many young people have fallen in love and gotten married, as nearly everyone does. "The First Act was called the Daily Life," says the Stage Manager, in the only place where these titles are identified. The second act is "Love and Marriage," and the third act, "I reckon you can guess what that's about."

It's 1904, just after the commencement at the high school, the time when most of the town's young people get married, and that's just what's about to happen to George and Emily. Events are recycled from the First Act to show the continuity of life-for instance, Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb begin fixing their family breakfasts, just as they did at the play's beginning; the Stage Manager describes how these women cooked three meals a day for decades, and "never a nervous breakdown."

Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs sit down to breakfast and talk about how George and Emily seem too young to be out in the world alone. They reminisce about their own wedding, predicting that the newlyweds will have their rocky times but nevertheless that marriage is for the best: Mrs. Gibbs says, "People are meant to go through life two by two. 'Tain't natural to be lonesome." George comes downstairs and goes next door to visit his girl but Mrs. Webb won't let him inside because a groom can't see his bride on the wedding day. Mr. Webb offers that there is sense in some superstitions as Mrs. Webb leaves George and his future father-in-law to chat awkwardly.

The Stage Manager then introduces a flashback to the conversation when George and Emily first knew they were meant for each other, when George had just been elected President of the Senior Class and Emily had been elected Secretary and Treasurer. While walking home from school, George asks Emily why she's been treating him so funny lately. Emily says she doesn't like that he's become so caught up in baseball, and he's gotten conceited. George is grateful for the honest criticism. Over a shared ice cream, George tells Emily about his plan to attend agricultural college; over the course of talking to her, however, he realizes that maybe he doesn't need to leave Grover's Corners and meet new people after all. "I guess new people aren't any better than old ones." George alludes that if he were to stay he'd want to go steady with her, and Emily says that she "always [has] been" his girl. George concludes, "So I guess this is an important talk we've been having."

The Stage Manager moves the action to the wedding, in which he himself plays the minister. He alludes to the sacredness of marriage, saying that the "real hero" of the scene is God, for whom he is merely standing in. Following the Stage Manager's sermon, the wedding begins. Both George and Emily have crises at the thought of taking this major life step, but their elders reassure them and the wedding continues. Their vows fade out as Mrs. Soames gossips to the audience about the loveliness of the wedding and how she always cries. The wedding scene ends in pantomime and freezes in a tableau, while the Stage Manager/Minister talks to the audience. He suggests that weddings are all the same and, instructing the audience to "remove any sense of cynicism from the next line," he continues, "Once in a thousand times it's interesting."

The tableau breaks, Mrs. Soames' gossip continues and the bride and groom descend into the auditorium and run up the aisle joyously. The Stage Manager dismisses the audience for the second intermission.

Analysis

The opening monologue of the second act, describing the passage of three years in terms of a thousand risings of the sun, contrasts with the motif of the moon in the closing scenes of the first act. Each day ends with a moon and begins with a sun. These two constants, marking both the unity and temporality of human life-its phases, its journey across the sky-tie each day to the next, just as the human lives within the play undergo cyclical changes.

Thus the Second Act continues the First Acts emphasis of the continuity and repetition of human life. The actions of the characters, presented in pantomime, are all cyclical - daily or seasonal activities, like fixing breakfast and feeding chickens and stringing beans. Even the changes that have occurred are placed within a context of memory so that they don't seem like changes at all, just more repetitions. For instance, when the newsboy is distressed at losing George's pitching arm the Constable points out a previous ball player who had also quit the game to get married. The same will happen again, George will be replaced as a ball player.

Even the seemingly extraordinary-this is, after all, a wedding day-is made ordinary by such perspective. Wilder makes sure to contextualize George and Emily's wedding as one of many million such weddings, whose participants have followed ritual superstitions "since the cave men." Wilder does not disparage this repetition; rather, he praises it, suggesting that these superstitions make an awful lot of sense. Superstition, however irrational it may seem, is another way of passing on tradition, and tradition, at least in Our Town has the glowing virtue of the test of time. Anything that has survived so many generations of scrutiny, the play suggests, must be worth something.

The play does not suggest that all human life is strictly cyclical, just that it is overwhelmingly so. Still, the exceptions to tradition are presented as important. The Stage Manager says of weddings that only "once in a thousand times it's interesting." This line rings with the earlier talk about nature being interested in both quantity and quality. Nature reproduces itself endlessly; everything repeats and re-cycles and renews. But every once in a while there's an anomaly, something truly out of the ordinary, and it is through those anomalies that nature can evolve. Likewise, human life cycles through birth and marriage and death, birth and marriage and death, each life fundamentally the same as the last - but one time in a thousand, something interesting happens, and that's how society naturally changes. Of course, even those changes are ordained-even the unusual is limited to "one in a thousand," and thus, in its unique way, is also cyclical.

The wedding itself balances two meanings, so to speak, of getting married-a wedding as a symbolic, public act, and a marriage as a private life-long connection. Much talk in the second act distinguishes the ceremony of a wedding from the lived fact of a wedding. When George complains that he wishes "a fellow could get married without all that marching up and down," Mr. Webb reasons that it's the women "standing shoulder to shoulder making sure that the knot's tied in a mighty public way." But Mr. Webb values the institution of marriage, even as he belittles its outward trappings. And at the wedding itself, both Emily and George panic when confronted with the ceremony and symbols of the wedding, but they are talked back into continuing down the aisle by appeals to what their marriage will really mean. Both the wedding-the public approval of the bond-and the marriage-the private bond itself-are important to the reproduction of a society, to its stability and endurance.

Similarly, the play Our Town balances symbols of things with things themselves. Wilder writes that all theater is symbolic. When Juliet kills herself, the actress who plays Juliet does not actually kill herself; in other words, what we watch on stage is not life - it is like life. Wilder uses this self-evident truth of theater to his advantage by making the artifice of the theater as noticeable as possible, eliminating the symbols like houses and costumes (or, when symbols are used, calling constant attention to their symbolic rather than real status) and concentrating on the meanings behind the symbols. Thus he hopes to offer a depersonalized human drama to act as a template, as it were, for our own everyday human dramas-which we can costume and "prop" with our own particular clothes, people, places, things, selves.

Summary

Stagehands place three rows of chairs on one side of the stage - these are graves in the cemetery. Mrs. Gibbs, Simon Stimson, Wally Webb, and Mrs. Soames begin the Act seated in these chairs, and the Stage Manager tells us that nine years have gone by, and it is now 1913. Grover's Corners is being slowly brought into modernity - more people have cars and lock their doors at night, but change comes slowly. The Stage Manager introduces us to the cemetery, pointing out the old graves, from the Revolution and the Civil War, and the new graves of the people we know. He suggests that the grief with which we bury our dead fades, but still there is something eternal in us having to do with human life. The dead, the Stage Manager says, begin with a fierce attachment to the living, just as the living have an attachment to the recent dead, but that this attachment fades as the dead wait "for the eternal part in them to come out clear."

Joe Stoddard, the undertaker, and Sam Craig, who has been away from Grover's Corners for twelve years but has returned for Emily's funeral, discuss the recent dead in the graveyard, mentioning Mr. Stimson's suicide. Then the funeral procession enters carrying black umbrellas. Mrs. Gibbs informs the other dead folk that the funeral is for her daughter-in-law, Emily Webb, who died in childbirth. As the mourners sing "Blessed Be the Tie That Binds" Emily appears dressed in white and sits down next to Mrs. Gibbs. Emily is still quite attached to her life and the other dead people listen with polite interest to her talk about her family; they allude that soon she will lose those feelings of connection.

After the mourners leave, Emily realizes that she has an opportunity to relive her memories. Mrs. Gibbs tells her not to, saying it would be painful. Emily appeals to the Stage Manager, who says that she would not only live a day, but also watch herself living it, knowing the things that living people don't. Emily doesn't understand why that would be painful. Mrs. Gibbs recommends that, if Emily must relive a day, she choose an unimportant one, and Emily picks her twelfth birthday.

And so it is dawn on February 11th, 1899. As in the first two acts, the newspaper and the milk are delivered, and Mrs. Webb comes in to begin making breakfast. Emily can't believe how young her mother looks, and says she didn't know her mother was ever that young. With difficulty, Emily speaks the same lines that she spoke as a twelve-year-old girl. The day unfolds just as it did; Emily, however, experiences everything quite differently, with a sense not of participation but of loss. "I can't look at everything hard enough," she says. With her family presenting her gifts and coasting through the day, Emily finally can't bear it and she cries out, "Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me." But Mrs. Webb doesn't hear a word she says, and goes on as usual.

The lights change and we're back in the cemetery. Emily breaks down sobbing, saying that she didn't realize, that "all that was going on and we never noticed." She has one last look at Grover's Corners, and says goodbye to "clocks ticking..." The dead discuss with the Stage Manager the inability of living beings to appreciate the life they have. The Stage Manager suggests that "The saints and poets, maybe" are the only people with a shot at seeing life. After this discussion the Stage Manager appears and draws a curtain over the scene. He winds his watch and looks at it, saying, "Hmm... Eleven o'clock in Grover's Corners. - You get a good rest, too. Good night."

Analysis

Our Town begins with birth and death - Dr. Gibbs delivers twins even as the Stage Manager tells us of the deaths to come of Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs. And so it ends, with Emily's death in giving birth to her child. So the cycle continues - and in other ways as well. Act Three is similar to those that precede it, though the subject matter is much darker. All three Acts, for instance, feature the hymn "Blessed Be the Tie that Binds." When it is first sung in Act I, it binds together all the characters as they go about their evening activities in the moonlight. In Act II, at the wedding, the hymn binds Emily and George in matrimony. Finally, in Act III, it binds Emily to the dead, and therefore to all the people who came before her, and all of us who will come after. The whole of humanity, the major coordinates of birth, death and love are interwoven into one substance at the close of the play.

Despite these consistencies, however, the Third Act of Our Town has long been seen as more the exception than the rule. A cheery, funny, sentimental play becomes, at its end, a dark and rather stiflingly sad rumination on the entrenched human inability to appreciate the lives we lead. "Such sobbing and nose-blowing you never heard," wrote Wilder in a letter after observing audience reactions in the Boston try-out. "Matinee audience, mostly women, emerged red-eyed, swollen faced, and mascara-stained. I never meant that."

Whether he meant it or not, the final Act of Our Town-and especially Emily's famous monologue delivered to her oblivious mother, where she cries, "Look at me!"-is sure to bring a lump to the throat, no matter how mediocre the production. Even though Wilder has attempted to keep Emily from emerging as too distinct a personality-even though he has hammered home throughout the play its allegorical character, the interchangeability of human lives-this death is still largely the reason that the play is so effective (and affecting). Perhaps this is because Wilder's intention is successful-we see ourselves in Emily, our own family, our own neglect for our own mother's, and our own horror at the possibility of our own premature death. We cry not for Emily, but for ourselves-for humanity writ large. Thus her death is the most powerful expression of the play's basic argument-that in the commonest events (and death, after all, is the commonest event that there is) lie the most extraordinary meanings of our lives. Only on the other side of possessing the mundane beauty of life can we fully appreciate the gift that we have. Just as youth is wasted on the young, Wilder suggests, so too life is wasted on the living.

Not that the dead are all that interested in life. In death, the individuals of Grover's Corners lose what little interest in life they possessed in the first two Acts. Critics of the play sometimes suggest that the dead representations of the townsfolk lose all of the little personality they ever possessed-that while they are always walking cliches, in death they devolve to utter ciphers. This isn't completely true: each of the dead characters represents him or herself quite clearly in terms of his or her prior personality-the misanthropic Mr. Stimson is still misanthropic, the motherly and supportive Mrs. Gibbs is still full of good advice. What has changed is the extent of their connection to human life: they have moved (or at least they are in the process of moving) from caring about the particulars of life-so-and-so's birth, such-and-such's death-to understanding life in its absolute terms-life, love and death in themselves.

Which brings us to the million-dollar question: what are they waiting for? We may assume that they are waiting for the second coming of Jesus - after all, these characters were faithful churchgoers. But, despite the presence of a wedding and a Christian hymn, Our Town is not specifically Christian. More importantly, its vision of the afterlife has little to do with heaven and hell. Everyone in Grover's Corners ends up in quite the same place - even Mr. Stimson, whose suicide is forbidden by Christian tradition - where "all those terribly important things" like "enemy 'n enemy... money 'n misery" don't matter any more.

So what are the dead waiting for, if not the second coming? "Aren't they waiting," offers the Stage Manager, "for the eternal part in them to come out clear?" It is worth noting here that Thornton Wilder himself was not a Christian but a Platonist-he believed in a division between Absolute spirit and Particular vessels of that spirit, in other words, between humanity and individual human beings. Perhaps, then, the dead in Our Town are passing away from their particularity, then, toward the realm of spirit, where they will become one with humanity itself.

Thornton Wilder, by presuming the perspective of those beings closest to understanding the spark of humanity within the human being-that is to say, the dead-concretely represents the paradox at the heart of his plat: our daily routine is both cosmically insignificant and eternally important. We are insignificant as individuals-as beings-but vastly valuable as containers of eternity-as humans. He represents this balance of insignificance and eternity, throughout the play, in ritualistic, relatively unimportant human gestures, which the dead see as imbued with great meaning. Value, at the last, consists not in rituals themselves-not in the presents that are given-but in how the unconsciously lived rituals of a human society bind us to each other-but in the connection that the giving of a gift represents. The tie that binds, Wilder suggests, is common humanity. And this shared humanity, consisting almost wholly of small gestures and quotidian commentary, is all in life that we can hope to appreciate.

• Biography of Thornton Wilder
• About Our Town
• Character List
• Major Themes
• Glossary of Terms
• Short Summary
• Full Summary and Analysis
• Summary and Analysis of Act I - "Daily Life"
• Summary and Analysis of Act II - "Love and Marriage"
• Summary and Analysis of Act III - "I guess you can reckon what that one's about"
• Related Links on Our Town
• Suggested Essay Questions
• No curtain. No scenery.
• Author of ClassicNote and Sources
• Purchase Our Town and Other Works
• Test Yourself! Quiz 1
• Test Yourself! Quiz 2
• Test Yourself! Quiz 3
• Test Yourself! Quiz 4
• Message Board on Our Town