Author: Thornton Wilder
Published: 1938
Synopsis: the stage-manager of ‘Our Town’ narrates the story of Grover’s Corners, a fictional sm(all)-American town, between 1901 and 1913. It tracks the growth, departures, and deaths of two neighbouring families through the slowly burgeoning relationship between high-school sweethearts George Gibbs and Emily Webb.
What moved me: Wilder’s prescience in terms of form. Stripping the face of illusion off his stage (removing set, curtain, and scenery) whilst also blending its crossover with reality (the Stage Manager is, after all, still a character within this play-world and is not the stage manager of the actual production) forced me to be hypersensitive to the gradual unfolding of time and how we may only demarcate it in retrospect. That is, time must be lived through before it may be analysed.
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