What was accomplished in the play is exactly what Thornton Wilder set out to accomplish. The play ends with George, having come in to pay his respects to his dead wife alone, crumpling in front of her grave, and her ghost and the character of the Stage Manager wishes everyone a good night. She is in awe and moved to the point of tears seeing all the things that she missed in her life. We follow Emily, who has died in childbirth, as she goes back to see her life again. This is followed by an abrupt act about Death, and Wilder takes the audience to the afterlife, showing both living people and the dead in the form of ghosts on stage. The next act is called Love and Marriage, and follows the two as they get married. We are asked to watch these two almost everyman characters grow up because they are assumed to represent us and how we were when we were young. George Gibbs is the Baseball player, incredibly earnest and thoughtful, engrossed in his sport. These are the two stars of the town, Emily Webb recites speeches and loves school, which shows in her drive and focus when it comes to her homework. Webb, we get a personal understanding of their family, and especially their children: Emily Webb and George Gibbs, the two protagonists of the story. “ An archeologist’s and social historian’s points of view began to mingle with another unremitting preoccupation which is the central theme of the play: What is the relation of the countless “unimportant” details of our daily life, on one hand, and the great perspectives of time, social history, current religious ideas, on the other?…What is trivial and what is significant about any one person making breakfast, engaging in a domestic quarrel, in a “love scene,” in dying? To record one’s feelings about this question is necessarily to exhibit the realistic detail of life, and one is once again up against the problem of realism of literature…I wished to record a village life on the stage, with realism and generality.”įrom the two town leaders of Grover’s Corner, Mr. He describes why he does this in “A Preface for Our Town” in the New York Times: Wilder creates this town without any props or scenery. We follow the story in the town of Grover’s Corner, New Hampshire, a fictional town, and turn the attention of the audience toward the quaintness and sweet simple-ness of its town goers. We get through life: we learn in our early childhood, we fall in love and get married in our adulthood, and then we die. It tells what, seemingly, is the story of America. It epitomizes American values: family, freedom, love, understanding.

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is an American Classic in every sense of the word.

Thornton wilder play