Is Our Town everybody’s town?
The play’s universal themes rest on a Christian eschatological vision.
In February 1938, two new plays opened on Broadway just a day apart. Both were about human mortality, both were set in small-town America, and both involved main characters who died and spoke truth from beyond the grave. Both plays had long Broadway runs, by 1930s standards, and were quickly turned into popular Hollywood movies with star-studded casts.
The first, Paul Osborn’s On Borrowed Time, is today largely forgotten, mostly vanished from the dramatic repertoire, the film version merely one of thousands of titles on Turner Classic Movies. The second, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, stands as one of the most cherished of all modern plays. It has been revived numerous times on and off Broadway and is frequently performed by community and school theaters around the world. Thirty years after its Broadway debut, Our Town was the highest-grossing play for the leading licensing house for scripts. Edward Albee called it “a masterpiece . . . probably the finest American play written so far.”
In Another Day’s Begun, Howard Sherman seeks to discover the secret of Our Town’s enduring impact. How did a play with such a provincial setting (an apparently all-White Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, population 2,642), the sparest possible staging (Wilder’s opening stage direction states: “No curtain. No scenery. The audience arriving, sees an empty stage in half light”), and only the barest of plots become a theatrical icon worldwide?
