"Cliff Notes - Our Town" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

NOTE: When Our Town was first produced, there was tremendous disagreement among the critics. Some saw this scene as satiric, others saw it as religious, and still others as an exercise in nostalgia. You should develop your own interpretation, supporting it with evidence from the play.

Mr. Webb next gives George the advice his own father had given him when he married--advice on how to keep your wife in line and show her who's in charge. George is a bit taken aback, but Mr. Webb goes on, "So I took the opposite of my father's advice and I've been happy ever since."

Is this another example of two views of an issue? Or is Wilder definitely on Mr. Webb's side? Perhaps Wilder is trying to nudge all men and women beyond immediate beliefs and attitudes to much larger issues? After all, he wanted to touch upon what is true for every person who exists. Doesn't Our Town have much less to do with particular people in a New England town than with the overall meaning of life?

To make sure things don't become too serious too soon, Wilder sends George home and has Mr. Webb offer his wife another superstition: "No bridegroom should see his father-in-law the day of the wedding or near it."

The Stage Manager interrupts again, dismissing the characters on stage. (He's a bit like the master of ceremonies in a variety show or the ringmaster in a circus.) This time he wants to show you "how this all began--this wedding, this plan to spend a lifetime together." And he adds, "I'm awfully interested in how big things like that begin."

But before you see Emily and George, he wants the people in the audience to reach back in their memories to when they were young and in love. Notice that two things are going on here. Wilder is again encouraging the audience to feel a part of what is happening, and he is suggesting that these emotions are universal and that everyone experiences them.

NOTE: THE MANIPULATION OF TIME Wilder has been playing with time all through the play. In the first act, verb tenses shifted back and forth almost at once. You were told what would happen to characters in their future (but in the past for the audience). Professor Willard talked about the land millions of years ago, and at the beginning of this act the Stage Manager described miniature changes in mountains that will not have a noticeable effect until far in the future. Each wrenching of time prepares you for the next. The first changes were only verbal; then changes were described. In the scene that follows between Emily and George, you move back in time only a few years. However, you actually view the scene as it took place. You are asked to accept that you can move about in time. The earlier manipulations of time prepare you for this one, just as this one prepares you for an even larger wrench in the final act. Wilder has deliberately organized the material of the play to create the strongest impact on the audience.

The Stage Manager takes two chairs from the Gibbs's kitchen and arranges them back-to-back at center stage. He puts a plank across the backs of the chairs and two stools in front of that. This will serve as Morgan's Drugstore on Main Street.

NOTE: SCENERY Wilder said that too much scenery on stage interfered with the action of the play. He also felt that the impact of a play was stronger if the playgoer had to participate by using his or her imagination. Wilder was well aware that a bare stage was all the Greeks had needed for their great tragedies, and that Shakespeare had also used few props, depending on dialogue to set the scene. When Our Town was first produced in the late 1930s, the bare stage was a startling novelty. Most plays of the time used realistic stage sets. However, the bare stage subsequently was used by a fair number of other playwrights.

Emily and George, high school students again, come on stage. They call good-bye to other friends, but when George asks to carry Emily's books home, she seems a bit distant. George wants to know what's wrong. She has difficulty saying it but finally tells him that she doesn't like the way he's changed. Baseball seems to have made him "conceited and stuck-up."

Now both of them are miserable. George says he's glad she told him, because "it's hard for a fella not to have faults creep into his character." Emily thinks their fathers are perfect and can't see why George can't be, too. George is inclined to think that "men aren't naturally good; but girls are." Emily thinks it's the other way around.

Wilder wants us to see George and Emily as both very young, with foolish ideas about the opposite sex. He is not ridiculing his characters (poking a little gentle fun at them, maybe), but reminding people in the audience that they were once young and foolish, too. The mood created here is one of nostalgia for a time remembered as wonderful but, when seen from the vantage point of adulthood, recognized as a little silly. Even if they are a bit silly, George and Emily are certainly idealistic. They seem to think people should try to be perfect.

Emily is so upset at the thought that she might have upset George that he takes her into the drugstore for an ice cream soda. So she won't be embarrassed, when the Stage Manager/Mr. Morgan asks if she's been crying, George says she was almost run over by a wagon.

Now George and Emily have one of those conversations that sound trivial to outsiders but are of tremendous importance to the people involved. George asks Emily to write to him while he's at State Agricultural College. She wonders if he'll lose interest in Grover's Corners once he goes away. He says that if that's a possibility, perhaps he shouldn't go. "I guess new people aren't any better than old ones," he says. So George decides to stay.

NOTE: LEAVING HOME You'll have to decide whether George is making a good choice here. By deciding to remain at home and become a farmer right away, is he giving up the chance to see life in a broader perspective? Is he getting so caught up in his immediate concerns that he won't have a chance to see that life is bigger than this? Or is he right? Would going away be the same as staying at home because home and away are all the same?

George tries to explain to Emily that he wants to stay because of the way he feels about her. In half-spoken sentences, they manage to express what they mean. "Would you be... I mean: could you be...," he says. "I... I am now; I always have been," she answers.

You don't really need to see any more of their courtship. Everyone can fill in the rest, from books, movies, and personal experience. But there's another reason Wilder stops here. Some readers believe that the play is an allegory, that the characters and events in the play are personifications of abstract ideas. An allegory tries to create a dual interest both in the actual characters and events being shown and in the abstract ideas being represented. This would explain why the characters are not very individualized, why, for example, there is little to distinguish Mrs. Webb from Mrs. Gibbs.

In the same way, Emily and George represent every girl and boy who have ever fallen in love. If you saw their relationship develop in distinctive ways, George and Emily would become unique and special and would no longer represent everyone.

The scene in the drugstore ends quickly. George doesn't have enough money to pay and offers to leave his gold watch until he can come back with the money. Mr. Morgan says he will trust George for ten years--"not a day over."

As in so many other scenes, when events threaten to become too emotional, Wilder ends this scene with a touch of humor. Does this keep you from viewing the events too seriously? Or does it keep you from viewing them too sentimentally?

Mr. Morgan turns back into the Stage Manager and announces that it's time for the wedding. The stage is rearranged to represent the church, and the Stage Manager has a chance to talk some more--to give a sermon this time, since he also plays the minister in the wedding scene. It's a brief sermon, but he brings in some important themes. He reminds you that marriage is part of the universal human experience and recognizes that people often feel confused when faced with a wedding, one of the major events of human life. "We thought that that ought to be in our play too," he says. This gives still another bit of emphasis to the idea that the people and events in this play represent human life in general.

Then he talks about the others involved in this wedding--the child who is yet to be born, and the ancestors, "millions of them." Past, present, and future are once more joined together.

He also talks about perfection--about the idea that "every child born into the world is nature's attempt to make a perfect human being." Not long ago you were listening to Emily and George talk about people trying to be perfect. They sounded a bit silly and naive. Now the idea has more serious overtones. Look for it to reappear in Act III.

It's time for the wedding to begin and time for the moment of panic. Mrs. Webb is upset--she never could bring herself to tell Emily "anything" before marriage. "I went into it blind as a bat myself," she adds. "The whole world's wrong, that's what's the matter."

Then three members of the baseball team appear. Their catcalls are filled with sexual innuendoes. The Stage Manager chases them away, smiling. "There used to be an awful lot of that kind of thing at weddings," he says. "We're more civilized now,--so they say."