No Curtain. No Scenery.
These are the first instructions in the printed stage directions of the text of Our Town, and they are a succinct representation of Thornton Wilder’s expressed views on the nature of theatre at the time that he wrote the play. He thought by the 1930s that theatre had become too safe – had lost its ambition to address deeper ideas about our existence. He railed particularly against naturalism because he thought that the more that a stage set tried to represent reality, the more it limited the imagination. In fact, he wrote A Preface putting forward these views to accompany the opening of Our Town, which appeared in the New York Times in February 1938. The sub-heading of the published article read: “In which Mr Wilder discusses such matters as Realism, Convention, Even Scenery, in Connection with Grover’s Corners.”

It is worth quoting from this Preface. Wilder wrote:
“The theatre longs to represent the symbols of things, not the things themselves…when the theatre pretends to give the real thing in canvas and wood and metal it loses something of the realer thing, which is its true business…Every concrete object on the stage fixes and narrows the action to one moment in time…When you emphasize place in the theatre, you drag down and limit and harness time to it. You thrust the action back into the past time…whereas it is precisely the glory of the stage that it is always ‘now’ there.” He said he “tried to capture not verisimilitude but reality…I tried to restore significance to the small details of life by removing scenery.” 

Wilder includes an ironic nod to theatrical convention in a stage direction early on in the text that actually specifies that “two arched trellises, covered with vines and flowers are pushed on”, to suggest gardens, and the Stage Manager then says to the audience somewhat impishly, “There’s some scenery for those who think they have to have scenery.”

Wilder intended that Our Town be performed on a mostly bare stage. The stage directions call for a table, a few chairs, and a couple of ladders, and the actors mime actions without the use of props. For example, Mrs Gibbs pulls up an imaginary window and starts making a fire in a stove; the doctor sets down his imaginary black bag; the newspaper boy hurls imaginary papers into doorways; and the milkman crosses the stage leading an imaginary horse and wagon. Stage directions do suggest that sounds can be added – clinking milk bottles, a factory whistle, or church bells. The result is that the staging feels very inventive, stimulating our imagination to fill in the world. The two ladders, for example, serve at one point to indicate the first floors of the neighbouring Webb and Gibbs’ houses, where George and Emily talk to each other from their respective bedroom windows. And in Act 3 of the recent Welsh National Theatre production the dead sit atop the ladders, their verticality evoking the tombstones, but also placing them in an appropriately liminal position, part way between earth and heaven.

As we noted in the podcast the actors re-assembling the set on the fly creates a great sense of energy and fluency in the staging. It allows scenes to take place simultaneously on different areas of the stage; for example, when the Webb and Gibbs families are having breakfast, each in their own neighbouring kitchens, but with overlapping dialogue. The multiple locations conjure the collective life of the town.

Finally, as we noted in the podcast, the lack of set allows that Our Town could be any town. Although the text is very specific in its description of Grover’s Corners, somehow it still allows for it to be transposed to other places, countries or communities. For example, the recent Welsh National Theatre production painted a picture of Our Town as a Welsh village, a sense partly enhanced by Michael Sheen’s lyrical Welsh accent, but also by their including references to the Welsh names of the local mountains. Otherwise, all of the other descriptions of Grover’s Corners were as per the original text. The play is not burdened with a site or time-specific set, and the universal nature of the play shines through as Wilder intended.