Playwright Edward Albee described Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as “the greatest American play ever written.” In fact Wilder’s quintessential portrait of rural America in a bygone time has somehow transcended its iconic American setting to become a universal meditation on mortality, community, and how we live our individual lives, wherever that may be. The play has been glibly dismissed by some as sentimental and parochial, but its grip is not just emotionally irresistible, it is unexpectedly profound, deepened by its surprisingly radical form and its provocative philosophical themes. As the critic John Lahr put it, the play manages to conjure both “the commonplace and the cosmic”.
Our Town opened on Broadway in February 1938, to mixed critical response but enthusiastic audiences. Its popularity was confirmed by immediate exceptional demand from professional and amateur companies for rights to perform the play – and it has been a staple of school, amateur and stock performance ever since. In fact, according to Lahr writing in the introduction to the Penguin edition of the play, “the play is performed somewhere in the world every day.”
As we record this episode, a new production of the play by the Welsh National Theatre has recently completed sell-out runs in Cardiff, Swansea and London, with Michael Sheen headlining as the Stage Manager, a role that has been performed by Wilder himself, as well as by all-American icons such as Henry Fonda, Paul Newman and Aan Alda.
I’m delighted to be able to add Our Town to The Play Podcast catalogue, and I’m privileged to be joined by someone who knows it exceptionally well. Howard Sherman is the author of “Another Day’s Begun – Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century, in which he not only gives a brief introduction to the origins of the play, but also collates more than 100 personal interviews with theatre artists who have performed in, or produced, the play. The voices of these practitioners provide a fascinating insight into the workings of the play, as well as being a moving tribute to its enduring power.
