Home / 2009-2010 SEASON / OUR TOWN / DIRECTOR'S NOTES

Director's Notes

by Charles Morey

This will be my fifth production of Our Town.
 
Without any real justification, I feel a sense of ownership in this play; as if I had rights to it that no other director has or should have. And I feel an odd sort of jealousy when I hear of productions of the play.    
 
I didn’t read the play until I was in my mid-twenties. Prior to that time when someone mentioned Our Town, I muttered something along the lines of “that old thing.” But right out of college, my first Equity job, I went to work as an actor at what was then a tiny summer theatre in a 150 year old barn in Peterborough, NH. As you drive in to Peterborough, you pass signs that read “Welcome to ‘Our Town’, Peterborough, NH”. And you can’t spend much time around Peterborough before you learn that Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town in Peterborough and about Peterborough.
 
Still – I don’t suppose I read the play until I had been working with the Peterborough Players for two or three summers and the talk rose up about the theatre’s connection to the play. I’m sure I probably muttered something in the arrogance of my freshly minted Equity card along the lines of “that old thing” and Sally Stearns Brown, who was then producer of the theatre sent me out to the bookshelves in the barn to get a copy of the play and not to say another word about the play until I’d read it.
 
I did – and was completely blown away.
 
 In 1976, we did Our Town at the Peterborough Players in celebration of the bi-centennial and I was cast as a very young stage manager. It was a profoundly moving experience. I have never seen a community “own” a play the way Peterborough owns that play. (In a strange turn of events, we filmed parts of the play for West German National Television!)  In 1983, I directed it for the first time, for the 50th anniversary of the Players. I directed it here at PTC in 1985 then again at Peterborough in 1993 for the 60th anniversary of the Peterborough Players.  And for the first  time in my life, I also acted in that production, playing the stage manager again. The last time, I will ever do that! Each of those productions was memorable and moving and “important” in some way in both my professional life, my personal life and in the life of these two theatres, as well. I expect this one will be too.
 
Four years ago, I had the great good fortune of receiving a fellowship to the MacDowell Colony to write for six weeks. There are 32 studios at MacDowell spread over 450 acres of NH woods and meadows. I was in a small stone cottage known as the Louise Veltin studio. As I walked in  to the studio for the first time I noticed a plaque stating that Edward Arlington Robinson had occupied the studio for fifteen summers and I thought “Hey, that’s cool.” Then as I was un-packing my research materials the wonderful Blake Tewksbury  came to the door to drop off my lunch (they do that at MacDowell!). We chatted for a moment and then he asked me if I know Veltin was the studio in which Thornton Wilder had written Our Town. I almost burst into tears on the spot – and didn’t think I’d be able to write a word.
     
Thornton Wilder first went to Peterborough and the MacDowell colony in 1928. He returned virtually every summer thereafter until the late 1930's. By the early 30s, he had already become quite well known, having won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Bridge of San Luis Rey in 1928. But he spent his summers at the Colony.
 
About his own work process, Wilder wrote:
 
"Many writers have told me that they have built up mnemonic devices to start them off on each
day's writing... my spring board has always been long walks."
 
And local legend has it that he would begin each day in Peterborough with a long walk that would sometimes range as far as Hancock and back. And frequently, he would walk part of the early morning with Fletcher Dole who delivered milk from his dairy farm right off  High Street, maybe a quarter mile from the MacDowell Colony. No one doubts that Mr. Dole was Wilder's model for Howie Newsome.
 
The opening night of Our Town in 1976, Fletcher Dole - well into his 90s then - sat in the front row with both hands perched upon his cane and just beamed as he listened to the words of this play.
 
Legend has it that that much of the Stage Manager was based upon the caretaker at the MacDowell colony and pieces of many local residents showed up in other characters as well.
 
It is said that Wilder stopped in for coffee every day at the soda fountain in Moulton's Drug Store - which later became Mike Goldman's Rexall and subsequently ended its days ignominiously as the Pizza Barn. It was torn down  a few years ago and the spot is now occupied by the parking lot for the Peterborough Savings Bank.
 
If you go up into the old Peterborough cemetery - up on Old Street Road - the site of the original town - down in the south east corner - you'll find a series of gravestones with the name Stinson on them - not Stimson - Stinson, one letter change. And you'll notice that the Stinson family lost three children all under the age of five within a three year period. Looking at that, you see at least what part of Simon Stimson’s "peck of trouble" might be.
 
Some people claim that Jaffrey is "actually" Our Town; and others claim Dublin, Harrisville or Nelson. Peterborough probably has the best claim for a host of reasons - but ultimately it doesn't really matter; because the play - as Wilder says - is so much more than "a genre study of the picture of a village in New Hampshire."
 
I want to read you a few things Wilder wrote about this play:
 
            "I see myself making an effort to find the dignity in the trivial of our daily life against those preposterous stretches which seem to rob it of such dignity; and the validity of each individual's emotion."
 
            "At first glance, the play appears to be practically a genre study of the picture of a village in New Hampshire. On second glance it appears to be a meditation about the difficulty of...'realizing life while you live it'. But buried back in the text is a constant repetition of the words 'hundreds', 'thousands', 'millions'. It's as though the audience...is looking at that town at ever greater distances through a telescope."
 
            "It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life."
 
 
It is a celebration in a sense of the simplest, most basic, and fundamentally most important of human concerns: Birth; Family; Love; Death. And overriding and encompassing all these concerns - the events that create what we call a life - is an enormous and in some ways truly courageous - statement as to the ultimate transcendence of the human spirit.     
 
Wilder doesn't ignore the darker side of human experience either. There is a hard edge that runs right through the center of this play that tempers any thoughtful person from dismissing the play as sentimental or syrupy. Right at the top of the play, the Stage Manager introduces Doc Gibbs and Mrs. Gibbs, then tells us: “they’re dead”. Not only is there the stated cynicism and despair of Simon Stimson, but there is an occasional and sometimes not very subtle undercurrent of bigotry and provincialism in this world that I believe is fully intended by the author.
 
But I can imagine a production of this play that allows it to become sentimental. The play is full of honest emotion; of honest sentiment but it must never become sentimental. In these people there is always a certain New England “asperity” if you will. A certain dryness. They don't wear their emotions on their sleeves.
 
This extends beyond character to the very presentational nature of this piece. Wilder always pulls us back from the story to the theatrical, presentational nature of the play. He always reminds us that this is a theatrical event with no real attempt at naturalism. And that serves as a constant reminder to the audience to distance themselves slightly. As Wilder says: "It's as though the audience is looking at that town at ever greater distances through a telescope."
 
And there is another constant reminder that brings out the hard edge in this play. Wilder is looking at this story and these people within the context of geologic time. Professor Willard tells us  the geologic history of Grover's Corners, the Stage Manager is continually putting the story in the context of the movement of the stars; of an audience “two thousand years from now”; of “millions upon millions of ancestors”. Over the millennia - Wilder says - the ambitions, the sorrows, the pleasures, the life and death of a couple of people are nothing when measured in any quantitative sense. But it is the human faith in the possibility that the spirit is transcendent that gives meaning to the smallest moment of our existence.
 
Wilder subtly undermines the play’s potential for sentimentality continually. In the wedding he says: “I’ve married over two hundred couples in my day? Do I believe in it?” And he answers: “I don’t know. M marries N… millions of them. The cottage, the go-cart, the Sunday afternoon drives in the Ford, the first rheumatism, the grand-children, the second rheumatism, the death bed, the reading of the will. Once in a thousand times it’s interesting.”
 
The Stage Manager’s speech at the top of the Third Act, Emily’s return to visit her twelfth birthday, George’s collapse at the grave, the death of two children: Joe Crowell and Wally Webb – these are  all events that are  fundamentally un-sentimental in their nature.
 
There is, however, something that is deeply and fundamentally affirmative in the play. And that is its core belief in and affirmation of the transcendence of the human spirit:
 
“Now there are some things we all know but we don’t take ‘em out and look at em very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names and it ain’t even the stars – everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal; and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people that ever lived have been trying to tell us that for five thousand years yet you’d be surprised how people are always letting go of that fact. There’s something way down deep that is eternal about every human being.”
 
One could describe that, I suppose, as a “sentimental” idea – but then you’d have to describe Emerson and all of American Transcendentalist thought and culture (both high and low) that proceeds from it as essentially “sentimental.” And there may be an argument to be made on that very score – but it is also a sensibility so ingrained in the American consciousness as to, in some way, confirm us as Americans.    
 
Wilder lays out the play in three acts. "The daily life"; "Love and Marriage"; and refuses to name the third act but it is clearly about death. He brings us full circle. In the first act he speaks of birth, the Polish twins, introduces the children; in the second act George and Emily fall in love and get married; and in the third, Emily dies.
 
A rhythmic cycle. "The cottage, the baby carriage, the Sunday afternoon drives in the Ford, the first rheumatism, the grandchildren, the second rheumatism, the death bed, the reading of the will." Yet through this cycle, there is the driving sense of moving towards something. The sense that man and nature are always "pushing and contriving" towards something.
 
In terms of the life of the flesh - Wilder tells us that "Every child that is born into the world is nature's attempt to make a perfect human being" and in terms of the life of the spirit - Wilder asks us "Aren't they waiting for the eternal part in them to burn through clear?"
 
I suppose, if you ended the play after the second act, you could perhaps look at this play as a sweet and somewhat sentimental genre study of a small New Hampshire town. But that third act lifts this play into the stratosphere. The third act makes it a great play. And the key moment of that third act is Emily’s “Good-bye world…”speech and the the stage manager’s speech that sets it up.
    
Even as I read this play today, seventy years after it was written, I am astounded by its innovation and the manner in which Wilder is able to use the play’s overt theatricality to inform and enlarge its ideas and emotional power.
 
I think Our Town is the great American play. That is not to say I think it is the “best” American play. It may be; it may not be according to your personal aesthetic taste. Those who tend to dismiss it are those who generally don't know it. But the craftsmanship is flawless; the theatricality is still innovative; the depth of its feeling is striking and it's blend of sentiment, every-day wisdom, and rock-hard faith in the transcendence of the human spirit is distinctly and peculiarly American.