“So friends, this is the way we were in our growing up and in our marrying and in our doctoring and in our living and in our dying.”
Pull out a copy of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and, depending upon the vintage of the edition, if it’s old enough, you can find that line. That’s how it read in the 1938 hardback edition, which was drawn from the original rehearsal manuscript. But at this moment, with theatres dark, with people fearing illness and falling ill, the ultimately excised “doctoring” as a key element in our lives holds unfortunate resonance.
production of “Our Town” (Photo by Stian Roenning)
While we cannot presently take refuge in theatres, people have done so for countless years, and in America, since 1938, Our Town has proven to be one of the most enduring of works. Contrary to many people’s misapprehension of it as a valentine to a bygone era, the play is a deep meditation on mortality. It starts dropping hints about its true concerns, beyond baseball games and ice cream soda-fueled romance, virtually from the start, when we’re introduced to one character by immediately learning about when he will die.
That character happens to be Doc Gibbs, who so far as the play tells us, is the only medical professional in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, where the story is set. He practiced in an era before personal protective equipment was standard issue, before private health insurance and Obamacare – and he ministered to everyone equally. The play begins with him having just delivered twins in the less affluent part of Grover’s Corners that the audience never sees.
The mundane, commonplace events of the play’s first two acts give way in the third to a metatheatrical and metaphysical exploration of what comes after earthly life. However, it is explicitly non-denominational and non-religious, ultimately designed not to have us contemplate what comes next, but rather how much we must appreciate what we have in life, even if it seems inconsequential, and perhaps at this moment, frightening.
For those who have never encountered the play, Emily, the play’s female lead, is lost to a medical crisis. She realizes only when it is too late what she has been forced to leave behind. As we shelter in place, as we quarantine, as our medical professionals work tirelessly and selflessly without all of the resources they need, it’s hard not to think about Our Town, which speaks so directly to the futility of regret and the value and interconnectedness of every aspect of life.
It also speaks to community, with the lives of the people of a small town inextricably interwoven, through education, through prayer, through dining, through sports, through singing. There’s not, we’re told, much culture in the town, but there’s great appreciation for the natural world, for the weather, for that which we often take for granted. Wilder constantly has his characters looking to the skies. Even children contemplate their place in the universe.
For those already chafing at the strictures of an invisible scourge, we long to return to our daily lives as they have been, consumed with getting back to work, to school, to income, to not fearing the proximity of others. When we do, and we will, but not without pain and loss, perhaps we will have a newfound pleasure in clocks ticking, food, coffee, sunflowers, and new ironed dresses, to recount Emily’s memories, as well as in live performance and greeting friends and strangers alike. Wilder had to imagine passings and an afterlife to get us to contemplate these things.
Now, more than ever, we are all Emily Webb. Biology is writing the story from which we must learn. As a character says in Our Town, “My, wasn’t life awful – and wonderful.”
My book, “Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century,” will be published in February 2021 by Methuen Drama.
