Our Town

by Thornton Wilder

Nipomo High School - 2014

Stop and smell the roses. Carpe diem. YOLO. In many ways, we urge each other to notice how wonderful our lives are, how rich the days can be, and how significantly the smallest momentary events can impact our perspective of life. Our Town, in many ways, could be Thornton Wilder’s message within this same motif. In simple terms, with minimal manifestation of theatrical artifice, we are invited through this play to sweep aside distraction, urgency, and our myriad concerns and absorb the vast beauty which surrounds us. Dictating, as the script does, that the play should be performed with minimal sets and mostly pantomimed props, this very intentional choice to draw the focus of the audience to the human interactions, rather than wrap them in a shroud of theatrical magic draws us to the grander, and simpler, moments of life. The Stage Manager speculates, “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.” Her ambling through the ordinary, peering into the minutiae of life, is the pause: a deep inhalation so that we may be better grounded. We come to find that we may forget what the actors say, we may forget what the set looked like, but we won’t forget how the performance made us feel. That is the beauty of what passes between human beings.