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TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century
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TIME, Almanac of the 20th Century.ISO
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30town
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1994-02-27
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<text>
<title>
(1930s) Our Town
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1930s Highlights
Theater
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
Our Town
</hdr>
<body>
<p>(February 14, 1938)
</p>
<p> Concerned with life in a small New Hampshire community. Our
Town is performed with nothing on the stage but a few tables,
chairs and step-ladders to indicate the town's geography. Partly
imitating Chinese methods. Playwright Thornton Wilder has
veteran Actor Frank Craven serve as property man, traffic cop,
living newspaper and cracker-barrel philosopher. The whole
effect gives ten times as much "theatre" as conventional scenery
could give.
</p>
<p> The plot of Our Town centres in a bashful boy-and-girl
romance, but the general theme is more properly the chores and
pleasures of Grover Corners as a whole. Without solemnity,
Wilder seeks to transform the commonplaces of village life into
the verities of human existence. Using fibred dialogue and lucid
pantomime, for two acts he catches the fumbling wonderment of
ordinary people, cakes their life with humor, charges it with
feeling. The emotional climate is exactly right: warm, but dry.
</p>
<p> The third act makes a sharp turn off Main Street. It is laid
in a cemetery: time has passed, many townspeople have died. The
dead sit rigidly on camp chairs, while close at hand a mass of
huddled wet umbrellas evoke a funeral. The dead girl comes to
join the other dead. But she still yearns for the living.
Permitted to return among them, she sees how blindly they grope
through life, comes back to the cemetery eager to forget. Living
people. Wilder seems to say, miss most of experience; only the
dead get down to essences. But this moral needs no such
statement, should not be interwoven with all the mysticism and
high-flown speculation that Wilder insists on adding. A good
playwright when he deals with living people, he is only a bad
philosopher when he deals with dead ones.</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>