Thanksgiving for Thornton Wilder’s OUR TOWN
My costume renderings for Emily for Our Town, 1981
November 21
For Thanksgiving week, I am thinking a lot of Our Town, so this blog is an entry about that play from my book, Theatre Is My Life! I am thankful for encountering this play when I was in high school, when Thornton Wilder’s themes really influenced my life.
“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?”
Emily from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town
Isn’t it wonderful that almost every day is the anniversary or celebration of some thing or other? Today, in 1938, Our Town opened on Broadway, and it is one of my all-time favorite works.
I have known a number of people who disregard all the wondrous, small delights surrounding them and seem oblivious to the blessings received: fine houses, good jobs, pleasant families, nice trips. In contrast, I find myself often in a state of weeping with gladness — today for a lady bug on my rug this morning, appreciating the temperature rising past freezing, thinking of a professor who 44 years ago opened my eyes to the theatre, feeling blood coursing through my veins, discovering that the invention of beer was in 6000 BC in Mesopotamia, and I could go on and on. Continuously through the day, I am aware of the gloriousness of life and how miraculous it is.
Thornton Wilder is at least partly responsible for that. I studied Our Town in high school, and designed the costumes for the show twice. The truth of the play struck a chord within me. Emily Webb Gibbs dies in childbirth with her second baby and from the grave, longingly looks back at the life from which she has just been snatched. Emily eventually comes to the realization that few humans perceive the magnificence of life while they are living it.
The Stage Manager allows Emily to visit earth again and experience one day over. Advised not to make it one of the big days of her life (such as her wedding day), she asks to relive her twelfth birthday. Once back in time, she wonders at her mother’s youth and can hardly stand the fact that no one is really paying attention to each other or absorbing the miraculous details of the world. Finally, she just cannot bear this wondrous grief any longer.
EMILY: [In aloud voice to the STAGE MANAGER.] I can't. I can't go on. Oh! Oh. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. [She breaks down sobbing. At a gesture from the STAGE MANAGER, MRS. WEBB disappears.] I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back — up the hill — to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners . . . Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking . . . . and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths . . . and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
[She looks toward the STAGE MANAGER and asks abruptly, through her tears.] Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?
STAGE MANAGER: No. [Pause.] The saints and poets, maybe — they do some.
And so, finding the experience unbearable, Emily returns to the grave and says to her mother-in-law, “That's all human beings are! — Just blind people.” The experience has opened her eyes and allowed her, and some audience members, to recognize that our lives are fragile gifts to be experienced in the “now.” Thank God I encountered this play when I did, stimulating early a perpetual gratefulness for just being alive.