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Our town by thornton wilder6/27/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() I spent 18 months conducting more than 100 interviews with theatre artists for a book about the play and it felt like I’d been running an Our Town focus group. For a play that many remember for its sweet romantic scene with two teenagers in Act II, or for the homespun charms that clung to it for so many years, this is a play that starts talking about death in its first few paragraphs, giving way in its third act to a scene of the aftermath of a tragedy from an atypical perspective. That’s because the play is about mortality, about the brevity of human life and Wilder’s charge to the audience to appreciate what they have while they have it. With its dictate of no scenery save for a couple of tables, a few chairs and two ladders, as well as segments with extended miming of activities, the play demands that audiences fill in the world portrayed, rather than show them any particular one. ![]() There are some things that place the play in a precise location and period but odds are that such references as the Philo System of raising chickens were pretty obscure even when the play was new. Paul Newman (the Stage Manager, centre) with Maggie Lacey and Ben Fox in the 2002 production of Our Town at the Booth theatre in New York. ![]()
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