Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” is a deceptively simple play, using the ordinariness of small-town American life, configured in the classic (conservative) “birth, marriage and death” narrative to examine subjects ranging from Puritan ethics to existential questions to ideas about the nature of perception.
The play proposes that perception is always partial, subject to change and limited by the one-directionality of time. Memory, however, provides for perception to expand our understanding of life. Memory helps us travel back and forth through lived experience thereby helping us make sense of our existence. The play suggests to us that while the meaning of what we perceive the moment we live an experience is partial, revisiting that moment can grant us better understanding, even wisdom. Emily Webb begins her journey to enlightenment when she dies and revisits a particular already-lived day in her youth. Here she is simultaneously experiencing past and present: she talks to other wise (albeit dead) fellow townsfolk at the cemetery and as she relives part of a day in her past she talks to the seemingly omniscient Stage Manager. When she tells him, “I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed.” she is reiterating something that we all suspect: nothing is ever fully known.
When Emily asks the all-important question, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? - every, every minute?” a short time before the play ends, the Stage Manager replies:”No...The saints and poets, maybe - they do some.” This must be Thornton Wilder’s philosophical guiding principle in abbreviated form: let us frequent the sage and the artist amongst us!
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