Commentary on Our Town Essay

The play Our Town, by Thorton Wilder is a simplistic piece of literature with an outlook and overview on the larger and less prevelent topic of the need to look at what is infront of you, the need to treasure the small pleasures that life has to offer. Thorton accomplishes this modesty most acutly with three topics. the first being the scenes following the friendship, courtship, and relationship between Emily and George. The second is emily's untimly, and dauting passing. The third is the justly shown the through the setting and the story neing told through a lone man; the stage manager.

The three acts in the play Our Town all play a part in revealing and divulging the efflorescence of their relationship and most importantly, over the course of the play reminds us as the audience to covet the small treasures of life. Emily and George walked through their adolescence, both interested in the other, alas oblivious to the others affections. ."You say you wer watching me when i did everything...i was doing the same about you all the time" (Wilder 71). Emily and George had passed three years and remianed closed to the revelations of their mutual taste for one another, and with one simple conversation their lifes began to allign. As the day of the wedding is upon them, both George and Emily have fits of apprehension, fear of the fact that they are indeed youmg, and barely know one another. Both parties get over their jitters and follow through with the wedding, remembering what first drew them together, and hearing adivce and biographies from their parents, teaching them to live an honest and happy life. On the morning of the wedding Mrs.Webb comes to realizations she was previously impervious to. "it came over me at breakfast this morning: there was emily eating her breakfast as she's done for 17 years adn now shes's going off to eat it in someone else's house" (Wilder 87). Mrs. Webb had gone through the years, letting her daughter exist without thinking too much of it outside of the routine she had grown accustom to. imprinting on the audience the need to take note of everyday going ons, and cherishing the time given to you with your children before they are grown up.

In act III the reader or audience finds that Nine years have past, and Emily has died in childbirth. Other then several other deaths, and several children growing up, the town has stayed mostly the same. As Emily sits with the other dead she wishes to revisit a moment of her past life. Emily is met by the other dead with numerous protests and pleas. "You not only live it; but you watch yourself living it" (Wilder 99). The other dead meet her with such demarche because they all know the pain it brings one to watch life happen, when one wasnt living it with full intentions, missing so much of what was going on, being oblivious to the obvious. During Emily's expedition back to her brithday as an young woman she is in a state of fret and near hysteria. She starts to notice all that we as humans ignore, the simplistic moments that go wrongfully uncherished. "Oh mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me!" (Wilder 107). Emily comes back to where the dead are seated and reflects her revelations back upon them. "We dont have time to look at one another" (Wilder 108). She sits in dispair with the other dead baffeled by all the living that takes place in a state of blindness. The fact that as human beings we dont take time to "smell the flowers", and we get so cought up in our own worlds we forget to relish on the small wonders that every day of life brings us, only to be realized when it is too late, when all you have left is time.

Throughout the play the idea of "minimalism" is a strong underlying feature, most dauntingly prominant through the setting and the stage manager. "There is some scenery for those who think we need scenery" (Wilder 5). The scenery in the play mainly consists of several chairs and a vast array of pantomiming. The unostentatiousness of the set is used as an understated tool to further impress upon the audience that we as human beings tend to focus on material objects. By relieving the physical objects from the production it leaves the patrons with nothing but the human interactions and the lives the create with eachother, blatently with the the candidness of life. Another contributing aspect is the presence of the stage manager. The stage manager goes through the story, clueing in the reader of the events of the past years. He does not say much about people in a personal sense, more as an indifferent observer, clueing in the audience of the mundane changes that occured in the time lapse. He shares small seaminly unimportant peices of information, aiding to the feeling of a prosaic small town. The stage manager aids the audience is coming to the realization that even in a small town where not much happens adn the people live seemingly uncomplicted lives, much is overlooked.

The play Our Town by Thorton Wilder is a subtle enlightenment of the understatment of everyday life, The things left unnoticed, forgotten, and ignored. This play illuminates to the audience that one must take time to smell the flowers, and slow down, take in all that is life, before it is gone. The tragedy that is evidently shown through the relationship of emily and george that is rushed into and is rather dauting only at the last moment, her untimly death where all is revealed, and the deft setting that the stage manager sets for the audience, taking none from the true story, leaving it raw for the true meaning to come out. "i didnt realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed." (Wilder 108). The story that unfolds for the audience is the same story that unfolds for the characters- That one must look at the bigger picture, and pick up on the minute details to have the full experience. The experience of fufillment and revelation that comes throughliving a life with your eyes fully opened.