"our town" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

George appears and throws himself on Emily's grave. This time Emily is no longer upset because he is troubled and unhappy. She only says, "They don't understand, do they?"

The Stage Manager slowly draws a black curtain across the scene--the first time a curtain has been used in the play. But when he begins to talk it's about the Grover's Corners you're used to, with most people asleep and a train going by. Then there are the stars and earth's place in the Universe. There's no life on all those stars. Only this one is "straining away all the time," so that "every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest." And then he tells the audience, "You get a good rest, too."

The cycle is complete. The play began with morning, with people getting up, and ends at night, with people going to sleep. It began with birth and ends with death. It began with trivialities and ends with eternity.


^^^^^^^^^^OUR TOWN: ON ALLEGORY

He [Wilder] hardly imagines them [the characters] as people, he rather invites the audience to accept them by plainly labelling them; they are sentimental stereotypes of village folksiness. They are therefore understandable by the greater number, and they serve to present the story and illustrate the moral.

This type of allegory is perfectly in accord with the Platonic kind of philosophy which it is designed to teach. The great Ideas are timeless, above the history of the race and the history of actual individuals. Any bit of individual or racial history will do, therefore, to "illustrate" them; but history and individual lives lack all real being: they are only shadows on the cave wall.

-Francis Fergusson,

Three Allegorists: Brecht, Wilder and Eliot, 1956

^^^^^^^^^^OUR TOWN: ON LIFE AND LOVE

Wilder has always been on the side of life and life is seen to be most directly affirmed through love. Love, then, is his most persistent theme and it has been for him an inexhaustible subject.

-Robert W. Corrigan, "Thornton Wilder And

The Tragic Sense of Life," 1961

^^^^^^^^^^OUR TOWN: WILDER ON WILDER

Our Town is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village; or as a speculation about conditions of life after death (that element I merely took from Dante's Purgatory). It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events of our daily life. I have made the claim as preposterous as possible, for I have set the village against the largest dimensions of time and place. The recurrent words in the play (few have noticed it) are "hundreds," "thousands," and "millions." Emily's joys and griefs, her algebra lessons and her birthday present--what are they when we consider all the billions of girls who have lived, who are living and who will live? Each individual's assertion to an absolute reality can only be inner, very inner. And here the method of staging finds its justification--in the first two acts there are at least a few chairs and tables; but when Emily revisits the earth and the kitchen to which she descended on her twelfth birthday, the very chairs and tables are gone. Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind--not in things, not in "scenery."... The climax of this play needs only five square feet of boarding and the passion to know what life means to us.

-Thornton Wilder,

American Characteristics And Other Essays, 1979

^^^^^^^^^^OUR TOWN: THE TRAGIC VISION

The vision Wilder offers of the human condition in Our Town is essentially tragic. It is a picture of the priceless value of even the most common and routine events in life and of the tragic waste of life through failure to realize the value of every moment. Unaware of the value of life, the people of Grover's Corners live their lives banally and seldom get beneath or above the surface of life.

The artistic problem basic to Our Town is that of showing that the events of life are at once not all they could be because they are taken for granted--but are priceless.... By relating the ordinary events in the lives of these ordinary people to a metaphysical framework that broadens with each act, he is able to portray life as being at once significant and trivial, noble and absurd, miraculous and humdrum.

-Rex J. Burbank, Thornton Wilder, 1978

^^^^^^^^^^OUR TOWN: ON OUR TOWN

If he [Wilder] did away with scenery and relied on a stage manager to set his stage, it was because the human heart was his real scene. It was the heart of the community which he laid bare.

In the thirties, tingling as they were with social consciousness, there were those who complained.... They could not believe in Our Town because it lacked brothels, race riots, front-page scandals, social workers, agitators, and strikes. The passing years, however, have only proved Mr. Wilder's correctness in writing as he did. His subject had no datelines. His interest was not what gets into the public prints. It was what each of us must live with in private. Man's spirit was his business; man's spirit and evocations of those small-important incidents which test us in our daily living.

-John Mason Brown, "Wilder: Our Town," 1949

^^^^^^^^^^OUR TOWN: WILDER'S USE OF TIME AND MEMORY