It Goes So Fast

From the Preface to Three Plays by Thornton Wilder

Our Town is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village, or a speculation about the conditions of life after death . . .  It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.  I have made the claim as preposterous as possible, for I have set the village against the largest dimensions of time and place.  The recurrent words in the play (few have noticed it) are “hundreds,” “thousands,” and “millions.”

Emily’s joys and griefs, her algebra lessons and her birthday presents – what are they when we consider all the billions of girls who have lived, who are living, and who will live?  Each individual’s assertion to an absolute reality can only be inner, very inner.  And here the method of staging finds its justification – in the first two acts there are at least a few chairs and tables; but when [Emily] revisits the earth and the kitchen to which she descended on her twelfth birthday, the very chairs and table are gone.  Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind – not in things, not in “scenery.”  Moliere said that for the theatre all he needed was a platform and a passion or two.  The climax of this play needs only five square feet of boarding and the passion to know what life means to us.

From Act Three of the play Our Town:

           

Emily:  I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back — up the hill — to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by Grover's Corners...Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking...and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths...and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. ...

She looks toward the stage manager and asks abruptly, through her tears:

Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? — Every, every minute?

Stage manager: No.  Pause  The saints and the poets, maybe -- they do some.

[Final scene of the play] The Stage Manager appears at the right, one hand on a dark curtain which he slowly draws across the scene. In the distance a clock is heard striking the hour very faintly.

Most everybody's asleep in Grover's Corners.  There are a few lights on: Shorty Hawkins, down at the depot, has just watched the Albany train go by.  And at the livery stable somebody's setting up late and talking.  Yes, it's clearing up.  There are the stars doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky.  Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there.  Just chalk...or fire.  Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself.  The strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.   

He winds his watch.  Hm....Eleven o'clock in Grover's Corners.  You get a good rest, too.  Goodnight.