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.
