This year, I spent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings of Holy Week in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. I walked its streets and climbed the hill to its centuries-old cemetery. But mostly, I just hung out in the adjacent backyards of the Webb and Gibbs families, two of the town’s most prominent. There, standing beside a trellis and next to a pair of simple gardens, I listened in on a wide range of seemingly private conversations about both the most banal and important of topics, ranging from the geography, history and (growing!) population of the town to more serious issues like courtship and marriage and, ultimately, life and death.
It was good to be there in Grover’s Corners, but I really could have been just about anywhere. That’s the point of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play “Our Town.” In a 1960 interview with a New York Times reporter, Wilder was asked about the location of the town’s inspiration, to which he replied:
“Young man, Grover’s Corners is your hometown in New York and mine in Wisconsin. It’s everyone’s hometown. I have received letters from people in Chile, Iran and Iraq who have read or seen the play. Despite sociological differences, they tell me they have readily identified their everyday experiences with those of ‘Our Town’s.’”
I was there by invitation, of sorts, having received a Zoom link to participate in a virtual reading of the play, organized by Jesuit Media Lab (JML). Unrehearsed, unprepared and with very little thespian experience among our group of about a dozen eager readers, we launched into and sometimes stumbled our way through the play’s three acts over the three nights, gently and prayerfully led and encouraged by our very own stage manager of sorts, journalist and playwright Renée Darline Roden, a regular contributor to JML. But we weren’t there trying to win a role in yet another amateur production of one of theatre’s most-performed plays. We were there — I realize now a few days later on Good Friday — just trying to make some sense of our lives during one of the church’s holiest of seasons. Right here in “Our Town.”
In an interview the following week, Roden says she selected the play as JML’s third play-reading experience for a few practical reasons: First, it had a large cast, which is perfect for the online experience. Second, it’s a modern play with accessible, ordinary language, also appropriate for our amateur cast members. Finally, Roden says, it’s a theatre classic for good reason.
“It’s so beautifully written and so eternal,” she says. “It’s ordinary life – love and marriage and death — things that happen to everyone even if [the details] look different in their own [lives]. Everyone comes from some kind of love and some kind of marriage-ish. Certainly I was very aware of the themes of death, resurrection, love and eternal life. I thought this was a great Easter play, and I wanted this to resonate with the liturgical season.”
On the first night, I was randomly assigned the role of the stage manager, which I knew from reading and seeing the play years ago, was a bigger role than it sounds. Although there was no audience for this production other than ourselves, I enjoyed showing the rest of the cast around Grover’s Corners, giving its latitude and longitude and setting the stage, so to speak, for the day of the first act, May 7, 1901. I pointed out the stores, schools and churches. I introduced the principal people of the town one by one as they entered and was particularly struck by the blossoming romance between Emily Webb and George Gibbs. Who wouldn’t be?
The next night, my role was to read the stage directions for Act II, set three years later in July, just after high school commencement, when most of the young people of the town “jump up and get married … soon as they’ve passed their last examinations in solid geometry and Cicero’s orations.” Among those young couples, of course, are Emily and George, although they both seem a bit skittish about the idea of growing up and taking on the mantle of adulthood and married life. After all, “It’s all a bit cruel,” according to Emily’s mother.
Still, it was a fine wedding, perhaps the “loveliest wedding ever,” according to the effusive Mrs. Soames. We all witnessed it, along with a cloud of ancestors, “millions of them.” And that’s not an unimportant detail or mere hyperbole. It’s where a little theology and life of the spirit come to the fore in the play, sitting as we are in a makeshift church and listening to the stage manager-turned-minister’s short sermon.
The next night, before we began the final act, Roden invited us into a time of prayer and consideration of the line that would be spoken by Emily near the end of the play, after her posthumous and disappointing visit back to the day of her 12th birthday: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute?”
The answer she receives from the stage manager, the answer we all know, is, of course, no. No, we usually don’t. Unless we happen to be “saints or poets.” Unless, like them, we learn to examine our lives and pay closer attention.
“Emily’s line at the end is so powerful and so Ignatian,” Roden says, “although I never saw it that way before. It’s a line that Ignatius would have loved. I didn’t intentionally choose [the play] because of that theme. That was a gift of our time together.”
Another of the participants agrees with this final appraisal of the play as a sort of “examen” experience. Mary K. Tilghman, a retired journalist who now writes novels and volunteers with the Ignatian Volunteer Corps in Baltimore, has found the examen a difficult exercise in the past. But participating in the play opened up something for her.
“These past three days, reading a play that instructs us to cherish the ordinary in our lives, led to an epiphany,” she says. “Oh! So that’s what the examen is all about! Going over the day … delighting in the simple joys I might have overlooked … considering the difficult moments, too … then stepping forward into a new day … with thanks to the God who made it all possible.”
Although some academics and critics have dismissed “Our Town” as being overly sentimental, that’s certainly not the experience of the play we read. For when was the last time pure sentimentality took your breath away and gave you a lump in your throat in the same way as when you learned the truth of the third act of “Our Town”?
Performing “Our Town” during Holy Week was an experience of faith. For the play is, perhaps above all, an experience of life and death as it relates to something more eternal, as those buried in the cemetery are not merely dead. No, they are waiting and, in the process, they are getting “weaned away from earth.”
“They’re waitin’,” the stage manager informs us. “They’re waitin’ for something that they feel is comin.’ Something important and great. Aren’t they waitin’ for the eternal part in them to come out clear?”
Top photo: Brent Isenberger / Des Moines Playhouse