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

By recalling past time, Wilder has, in the three acts of his play, created his own time separate from that time of the audience which ticks away each minute. He has presented in recognizable sequence birth, marriage, and death, events analogous to the cycle of life of any member of the audience.... The repeated shifts in time are reminders that all parts of life's sequence are in operation for any number of people at any time. It is the force of memory that is always in the present tense. This memory, juggling all the events at once like a circus performer, keeps the action in the eternal now on stage.

-Donald Haberman, The Plays of Thornton Wilder, 1967

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

The problem Wilder set for himself was to find a language recognizable as ordinary middle-class speech but still able to convey feeling and meaning. The dialogue is the speech of anyone, and that is the point. Cliches are cliches precisely because they are so very true on an elementary level. The absence of scenery and properties and the exploitation of the stage as stage both permit the cliched dialogue and prevent it from being merely banal. The commonplace in such speech is returned to its pristine truth, as though it were being uttered for the first time, and the simple truth of family living is given new life.

-Donald Haberman, The Plays of Thornton Wilder, 1967

^^^^^^^^^^OUR TOWN: ON THE IMPORTANCE OF LIFE

The meaning of life is revealed in living--hot bath water as well as great festivals--and that living must be done with an awareness that it can cease at any time. Life must not be lived as though it were a mere passage to something better. It cannot be embraced with reservation. The sorrow is that there is no permanence.

-Donald Haberman, The Plays of Thornton Wilder, 1967

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