Thornton Wilder’s Good Old Days

 

David Begelman

 

  Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning drama Our Town has been staged steadily since its debut in 1938. An enormously popular vehicle, it is a favorite among area theaters, community theaters, and student productions alike. Yet it represents something of a paradox. Rarely, if ever, does the play receive criticism these days, a surprising feature of its literary history.  Most dramatic literature, after all, has a downside, as much a traditional aspect of it as its virtues. Maybe we should be a bit wary about intimations of flawless authorship.

 That being the case, why should Our Town remain impervious to criticism for decades, given the slings and arrows to which even our most iconic literature has been assailed? Voltaire (along with many of his Enlightenment French peers), Tolstoy, and T.S. Eliot have all savaged Shakespeare’s masterpiece Hamlet, and God knows how many other plays that have stood the test of time go through similar ringers.

  Actually, Thornton Wilder’s play was panned the first time it opened in Princeton, New Jersey, in January of 1938, while the theater magazine Variety moaned, “It will probably go down as the season’s most extravagant waste of talent.” A week’s run in Boston after opening failed to alter critical reception, not the only misfortune at the time. An associate of then director Jed Harris committed suicide when she failed to get a part in Wilder’s play, sending a wake-up call to casting directors everywhere just how much they play with fire.

When Our Town hit Broadway, the shoe was suddenly on the other foot, and  mixed notices were drowned out by accolades. The latter gathered momentum when The New York Times critic, Brooks Atkinson, gave the show a rave. “A fragment of the immortal truth,” intoned this reviewer enchantingly, although he failed to spell out what fragment of which truth was on display in the play.   

I have the sneaking suspicion that many Our Town enthusiasts might balk at the very thought of criticizing a work that is for them as sacred as motherhood and apple pie. But is a simile apposite here? The show is all motherhood and apple pie (or a darn good simulacrum of them)—in all likelihood one of its failings, as well as a secret of its enduring popularity.

 The other ingredient of the drama’s public success is a wistfulness on our part about the good old days, or memories of them in which Our Town seems to revel. Of course, if the “good old days” of small towns like Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, weren’t really as good as the playwright depicts, we might consider them to be fantasies of the past we cling to because the illusion brings a measure of personal solace. The comfort of illusion is a Eugene O’Neill theme in plays in which the illusory is underscored for what it is, namely, not reality. Our Town has the distinction of fostering an illusion about small town life it takes to be homespun reality, quite another wavelength.      

In The Fantastiks, the character of El Gallo muses:

 

Try to remember the kind of September

                                        When life was slow, and Oh  so mellow…

                           

like it is, presumably, in Thorton Wilder’s Grover’s Corners. But El Gallo is a kind of Chorus figure whose function in the second act of The Fantastiks is to introduce two young lovers, Louisa and Matt, to a bitter side of reality than what they bargained for in their first act dreams of romantic love and a bountiful world of delight. The young lovers in Our Town, Emily and George, never quite get doused with the harsher side of reality, unless this amounts to the inconvenience of strained (but hardly traumatic) exchanges while courting each other, or experiencing some nervousness over the idea of finally getting married before they, like generations before them, enthusiastically take the plunge.

When Emily and George marvel at the beauty of the moon, the smell of heliotrope, the taste of strawberry phosphates, or the sound of the train all the way to Contoocook, one wonders whether this is a plausible depiction of adolescents with raging hormones. Sounds more like the diversions parents hope their youngsters are pursuing, in contrast to, say, a furtive tumble in the hay at midnight in the darkest corner of a barn.

When Thornton Wilder himself insisted that Our Town “…is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events of daily life,” what events is he alluding to that rise above a sugarcoated view of what people are all about?

 Actually, much of Our Town draws its inspiration from how we should like the past to have been, not the way it really was. Its characters mouth homilies about daily routines that have a comfort zone in Rapunsel’s castle, not real life:

 

                           Emily:

                           Grover’s Corners isn’t a very important place

                           when you think of all—New Hampshire; but I think

                           it’s a very nice town.

 

Emily Webb has a gift for understatement. That Our Town characters are “nice” is a no brainer. It’s that they’re too nice—to a point one might uncharitably describe as dullsville.

On the other hand, when it comes to the relationship between children and parents, the latter’s treatment of the former is transparently a case of incessant hectoring, masquerading as loving attention. Mrs. Webb is particularly guilty of this:

                           

                            Mrs. Webb: 

                Children! Now I won’t have it. Breakfast is just as

                Good as any other meal and I won’t have you gobbling

                like wolves. It’ll stunt your growth—that’s a fact. Put

                away your book, Wally…Walk fast, but you don’t have

                to run. Wally, pull up your pants at the knee. Stand up

                straight, Emily.

 

Is it any wonder that characters in ancient Greek dramas resorted to matricide to seek relief? 

After Emily dies in childbirth, she visits her town of Grover’s Corners as a ghost and comes to realize that she hardly appreciated what a good thing life was while she was living it. The epiphany is much like the one experienced by Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, when visiting his own grave sight with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

Considering the stone-faced miens of other departed neighbors who sit in chairs representing graves on stage, it appears that the play’s deceased are remorseful to the point of paralysis. Their tone is, as the playwright admonishes, “matter-of-fact, without sentimentality, and, above all, without lugubriousness.” The dead, we are to assume, wouldn’t be caught dead being lugubrious; it sucks the charm out of being beyond the pale. 

In Our Town then, all characters are having one whale of a time without knowing it when they are alive. Evidently this becomes a problem for dead Emily, whose sudden insight—and one confirmed by Mrs. Gibbs—is that “Live people don’t understand, do they?”

Emily is cautioned by both Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Soames, associates in what Raymond Chandler would undoubtedly call The Big Sleep, not to return to the land of the living. The sentiment is echoed by the ubiquitous Stage Manager, who observes laconically that “Yes, some have tried—but they soon come back here.” The admonition is reinforced by the frightful prospect of what the dead may expect when recycled: “You not only live it; but you watch yourself living it.”  

For Thornton Wilder, not knowing you’re fulfilled while you actually are apparently takes the spark out of things when you are alive. As he says in the play, the trick is, “Realizing life while you live it.” The route to this curious achievement is obscure, although not without a like-minded reprise in other texts. Bernard Shaw had his intellectual hero, Don Juan, proclaim in Man and Superman:

 

The Statue: …Why should [Life] want to understand itself? Why not be content to enjoy itself?

Don Juan: Without a brain, Commander, you would enjoy yourself without knowing it, and so lose all the fun.

 

Our Town innovated a minimalism in staging. Actors in the play pantomime food, cutlery, drawn horses, string beans, windows, and other kinds of props that enter into the action. The elimination of unnecessary artifice resonates with a biographical fact about the playwright. His father, Amos Parker Wilder, professed an  impatience with “art,” preferring instead to bolster “character,” an obvious enough pitch for Republican Party ideals; no wonder Amos was granted a consulate in Hong Kong  by Teddy Roosevelt.

The antipathy to new-fangled frills (subsidized in other arenas of national life by wasteful government spending, a.k.a. entitlements to the poor, never bailouts of corporate big wigs) comes as no surprise to any tourist visiting Grover’s Corners. According to Mr. Webb, Emily’s father, it’s eighty-six per cent Republicans, and a mere six per cent Democrats, a sure sign of the town’s economy of spirit, not to mention a head start in getting on the good side of the Lord with expediency.                         

Our Town may have been Thornton Wilder’s way of echoing the sentiments of his paterfamilias about “art.” The play strives to portray character by repudiating artifice, the paraphernalia of stage props that distract from character development. (And just why is a ladder less of a bothersome contrivance for gawking at the moon than a simple frame on stage?) The conceit, however, has a problem. Mimicking objects may be a sure way to rivet an audience’s attention on the existence of invisible items, rather than eliminating a focus on their inconsequentiality. What begins as an attempt to highlight character may end as a distraction from a purpose that sticks out like a sore thumb.

The character of the Stage Manager is the one who introduces us initially to Grover’s Corners and its inhabitants. He gets his finger into every pie, although not without affection for the other characters. It’s when he fancies himself an oracular source that slumber slowly creeps up on us:

 

Now there are some things that we all know, but we don’t

take’m 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 earth, 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 ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand

years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always

losing hold of it. There’s something way deep down that’s

eternal about every human being.

 

A cracker barrel Plotinus, for sure. You can almost hear the chorus of violins coaxing words to fly up to heaven from their homespun launching pad.

At the end of the play, the omnipresent Stage Manager bids farewell to the audience, which, unbeknownst to him, is yawning beyond the fourth wall: “Most everybody’s asleep in Grover’s Corners,” says he. You’re telling me.