Written by Assistant Director, Andrew Oppmann
DESIGNING THE WORLD OF OUR TOWN
THE COSTUMES
The events of Our Town —including the flashbacks—span from 1899 to 1913. Our Costume Designer, Scott Rött, kept the costumes authentic to that period. It was important the costumes looked like real clothes that people worked and lived life in—there’s a worn-in feeling about them. Set in New Hampshire, the New England nature of the play suggests that practicality and efficiency are important to the people of Grover’s Corners (as well as playwright Thornton Wilder). Those values are central to the characters and is reflected through their attire.
Costume renderings by Scott Rött, 2023. Photo by Hannah Jo Anderson, 2023.
THE SET
One of the first stage directions of the play reads, “No Scenery.” Tables, chairs, a bench, a board, and two stools are all Thornton Wilder gives us. Scenic Designer Takeshi Kata honors the intention of the playwright, putting relationships between characters front and center. Limiting the scenic architecture to a handful of simple things further illuminates what is occurring between people.
THE SOUND
In a play where there are no props and the set is limited, sound becomes a crucial world-building element. Sound Designer Joe Cerqua sourced and fine tuned everything from train whistles to horse whinnies to chickens and more to bring Grover's Corners to life. We’ve also built in the use of foley sounds - Joe Crowell hurling newspapers, Mr. Webb pushing his lawn mower, a school bell in the distance - to round out the play’s auditory landscape. There’s a lot to listen for in this rather quiet town!
VOICE & TEXT
There is something unremarkably remarkable about the simplicity of this text. Our Voice and Text Coach, Santiago Sosa, helped our actors lean into the non-sentimental, everyday matter-of-factness characteristic of New England, using a limited vocal range to create a grounded straightforward tone that supports the specific poetry of this piece.
THE WORLD OF OUR TOWN
Our Director, Tim Ocel, started the first day of rehearsal with the following thought: “This is our town. Not my town, not your town, not everybody’s town, but our town.” This production is imbued with the uniqueness of this specific place at this specific time with these specific people.
Left: Sarah Day with script during a rehearsal for Our Town. Photo by Hannah Jo Anderson.
The real-life inspiration for Grover's Corners is assumed to be Peterborough, New Hampshire, considering it’s where a significant amount of the play was written. Although the play is set in New England, Thornton Wilder is originally from Wisconsin and a lot of his insights into family life are taken directly from his upbringing in Madison, WI, where his father was even the editor of the Wisconsin State Journal (similar to Mr. Webb).
ACT I: DAILY LIFE
The first act is composed of brief scenes from daily life. There is almost no dramatic action. The day begins and it ends. Although the play is time specific, the conversations between father and son, mother and daughter, husband and wife, etc. each carry something timeless about the human experience. We may or may not identify with the specifics of New Hampshire at the beginning of the 20th Century. The Stage Manager says “This is the way we were,” and not “the way we are.” Yet still, the play endeavors to examine what connects us both today in 2023 and in 1901.
ACT II: LOVE AND MARRIAGE
George and Emily are at the center of the second act, titled “Love and Marriage”. Wilder chronicles another day in the life of our characters, but this time it’s George and Emily’s wedding day in 1904. Over a hundred years ago, it was common for young people to get married following high school graduation. Our Town was originally titled “M Marries N,” and that wording can still be found in the play’s definitive edition.
“I've married over two hundred couples in my day. Do I believe in it? 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 grandchildren, the second rheumatism, the deathbed, the reading of the will...Once in a thousand times it’s interesting.”
THE STAGE MANAGER
In the summer of 1935, Thornton Wilder was the best man at his brother’s wedding and was intrigued by the wedding day customs. He incorporated some of these observations into this act while writing the play in 1937.
ACT III: DEATH
Nine years pass between the wedding and now, making it the summer of 1913. The third act is set on a hill top, much like the Hill Theatre where our production occurs. It looks at how we continue after we finish living our life. Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) predates Our Town and ends with, “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” The Stage Manager in our production attempts to be that bridge, linking the present to the past as we look forward to our future.
ABOUT THORNTON WILDER
Provided by the Thornton Wilder Family
Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) was a novelist and playwright whose works celebrate the connection between the commonplace and the cosmic dimensions of human experience. He is the only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes for both drama and fiction: for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and two plays, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. His other novels include The Cabala, The Woman of Andros, Heaven’s My Destination, The Ides of March, The Eighth Day and Theophilus North. His other major dramas include The Matchmaker (adapted as the musical Hello, Dolly!) and The Alcestiad. The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, Pullman Car Hiawatha and The Long Christmas Dinner are among his well-known shorter plays. He enjoyed enormous success as a translator, adaptor, actor, librettist and lecturer/teacher and his screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt remains a classic psycho-thriller to this day. Wilder’s many honors include the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. More information on Thornton Wilder and his family is available in Penelope Niven’s definitive biography, Thornton Wilder: A Life (2013) as well as on the Wilder Family website.