A Play in Three Acts by Thornton Wilder (2003-09-23)

The book was perfectly fine in terms of its looks. It came in great condition. The story itself is a bit boring though. I had to buy it for an acting class. The impact and meaning behind the final scene with Emily is so powerful. But the rest of it fell flat for me. I didn't gain enough insight into the characters to really care about them, I didn't care about anything that was happening, there was no real character or interesting plot development and all the action was very mundane and quick. I personally wouldn't suggest buying the book if you don't have to. Just find a excerpt of the final scene and read that. Or watch it instead of reading it, it comes a bit more to life when there is actual acting involved instead of the story on its own. I really don't relate to all the hype about this play.

This is a strange play. The political satire is timeless. However, I did not read it for enjoyment. I read it to help me to understand it a little more before I saw it adapted in a German theater is Saarbruchen. The little acting company was excellent and I enjoyed the play in its updated version.

This is a classic play and is one of the few that push us to face our mortality rather than deny it emotionally. It is rather easy to produce because the scenery required is very limited. For productions with young people, some historical orientation is helpful as the story takes place at the turn of the nineteenth century.

This item took a long time to arrive -- quick shipping was never promised, though. I ordered before Christmas, and it came in early January. I was also surprised to find that it was an old book that had 3-4 of Wilder's plays in it. It was a gift for a family member, and I think they are pleased. It is fun to have more of Wilder's plays, some of his obscure ones. It was just not expected.

It isn't badly written, and most people would regard it as a classic but I, personally, couldn't stand it. The first two acts were dreadfully boring and a struggle to get through, but the third was nice enough. The overall lesson of the play is a good one, but actually reading through it was not a pleasant experience for me. I realize the play's merit and importance, but was just generally unimpressed with the actual plot.

My son had to read this for school. He was not all that happy about it but then again he is not a avid reader. He said the book had a nice story line to it but was not a book he would have chosen to read. He did enjoy doing the reports so comprehension must have been easy.

To begin, I had never read Our Town in school or seen any of the stage or screen adaptations of it. My experience with the story is only what people were telling me about the productions they had seen or were forced to be in... And of course, I do have an immediate intimacy with the towns in the shadow of Mount Monadnock, especially Peterborough, NH, which many say is the basis of the play.

The piece is a subversive and energetic deconstruction of modern America, pushing the boundaries of taste and framing all of our mundane actions in the face of “normalcy” to its absolute, bare stage. It is a triumph, and I can see where so many have tried to study it for its absolute postmodern take on modern American life. It is striking, brutal, and under the hum of a portrait of America lies the hidden truth and shocking veneer about life in general... A portrayal suggesting that we don't know what life means, we “act” on a “stage” as we are operating in our daily lives, and we are constantly hiding our ills and our struggles as we travel on the inevitable train toward our death, death, death.

Which is where it gets weird for me, in a way. I think this play was incredible and I look forward to seeing it performed – but in a sense, I almost dread seeing the piece performed because it is easy to see the many ways in which the production can take a turn from the stylized, David Lynch portrayal of Americanness that I saw when I read it, and travel down a bizarre road of nostalgia and bittersweet Main Street USA that completely misses the mark. Looking back on what people have said about the play almost sides with the latter – that they had performed it in a community group that seemed to want to put on an “All American Play” in a very sincere manner, and not so much of the overall ironic manner that I seemed to see the piece actually personifying.

I felt as though this play holds a mirror up to us, and that there is some underlying fingernail scratch hidden around every scene change and appearance by the director leading us down the path of modified speech and highly orchestrated everyday life. The horrors of what we live through, and our struggles in the first world is only a step above the barbaric bare bones of the opening of the stage before the stage is set, and that death hides in the shadows leaking between the jagged back wall and lighting into the whitewashed glory of our minimalist set. I think it would take a very special teacher to teach this to 9th graders in public school and the students understand the subversiveness of the piece that I got out of it as a grown man reading it. I know I am greatly generalizing here, but an average American fourteen year old may get the surface explanation out of the text at best – which may contribute to that wholly incorrect approach by my anecdotal community theatre production that I mentioned earlier… In the right hands, however, it would easily awaken awe and fear of the mechanistic orchestrated production of everyday life.

A wonderful piece, and I am certain that on its first performances, the night was electric with whispers of greatness and confusion with what was immediately seen as a wildly new, postmodern piece. I see the audiences of the day mirroring today's audiences reveling in the mystic awe of seeing something so new and so unusual that they can't help but want to see it again to solidify the analysis they troubled themselves with for weeks after the performance. Our Town is truly an American stage classic.

Every high school student in America has probably seen this play or acted in it, since it's a staple in every drama program. Unfortunately, its message is probably lost on a sixteen year old, I know it was lost on me. But something about it has stuck in my head all these years. A book I'm currently reading made reference to Our Town and at the same time it had popped up as part of a storyline in my own writing. I thought I'd better revisit this Pulitzer Prize winner.

Our Town is a play in three acts and tells the story of two families, the Gibbs and the Webbs in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. We watch George, the doctor's son and Emily, the daughter of the newspaper editor, grow up, fall in love and face the end of life while the townspeople go about their business every day.

Life hasn't changed much over the years. We get out of bed, go to work, hustle the kids out the door to school. The children grow up, get married, and build a life starting a new family. And for all of us it ends the same way, in death, leaving the living behind. We may want to think that our fancy cars, computers and smart phones have changed our lives but if we take the time to look deep into the our core, they have not. Life remains the same with or without modern conveniences.

One of the many lessons of Our Town is that life is precious. We should try to make each and every day the best day of our lives. Maybe we can only learn that through the wisdom that comes with age. Our Town's story may be lost on the young, but I never forgot it. And I bet you haven't either. It's well worth reading again as an adult. Thornton Wilder's play is classic and timeless and even more meaningful when wisdom is on your side.

Novels, films, dance, and plays at their most basic help us understand ourselves, put our lives into prospective, and most of all show us that we are not alone; that regardless of our age, our nationality, our position in life, we are, when reduced to the most elemental aspects of living, more alike than different. Few works accomplish this better and in the simplest way imaginable than Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Populated with archetypes, or representations, of ourselves, it is a play about every one of us.

In structure, it spans the progression of our lives: Daily Life, Love and Marriage, Death and Dying. Each of the three acts presents the ordinariness of life, which, as we learn in the end, can be quite extraordinary, the very essence of living, if we pause occasionally to relish them. Of course, as Emily realizes in the end, we rarely, if ever, do. The terrible sadness here is that we miss so much, as those of a certain age will attest; the hope is that we will pay more attention.

The action in the play is the routine of living, routine that even today mimics in general terms how we go about living our lives. The characters aren't what we would consider fully fleshed individuals; they are frameworks upon which we can drape our own experiences, the outlines of people who may remind us of acquaintances, of events that transpired in our own lives and our families. Yes, situations and families and people may seem different from these early 20th century New Englanders, but Wilder has drawn them broadly enough so that we see that while we might be different we also share much. This accounts for the fact that troupes have successfully performed Our Town around the world and regularly since its first performance in 1938 at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, NJ.

You'll find this volume a particularly good one to own. It begins with a brief introduction by David Margulies, a playwright himself and prof at Yale, that puts you in a frame of mind to enjoy and get the most from the play. In an afterword by Tappan Wilder, Thornton's nephew, provides insights into the play and excepts from Thornton's correspondence and discussions of the play.

I understand that plays are meant to be watched and not read. I have never seen a performance of this play, but it’s one I’ve always wanted to read. As a high school reading language arts teacher, many books come into my possession. This slim volume had been on my shelf for some time before I picked it up one evening and began reading.

Metatheater is a fascinating concept. The dialogue and the characters feel more important to me in this play than they might in a play with a lavish set. All the extraneous details fade away, and Wilder makes readers/watchers focus on the themes of life, love, and death. It’s a beautiful story. Although death is the main idea of the third act, this play is strangely uplifting. I came away from the story with a sense of purpose. We must treasure every moment of our time here on this beautiful earth.

I appreciate this play more and more every time I read it, and I have read it quite a bit! It has been written that Thornton Wilder found "the cosmic in the commonplace" in "Our Town", and that is indeed the case. This play is a celebration of the everyday and mundane details of human existence. And although we like to imagine that our lives are composed of things larger than the everyday exercise of living, we are wrong. There are exciting and "big" moments in most lives, but that is the rarer action. Most of the time we are going about our little sphere doing much the same thing, with the same people; and Mr. Wilder wrote a play that reminds us that this is not at all a bad thing.
The three acts of this play are structured in a manner that allows them to encompass the most salient features of human life: everyday living, love/marriage, and of course death. Much attention is usually paid to the third act of "Our Town" because it is here Wilder is at his most sentimental and also where he makes his point most obviously. And I don't say that to detract from the play. The third act is brilliant, and gets to me every time. However, the first two acts are subtle worlds of genius that yield even greater rewards as one goes back and rereads them at later intervals in life.
Many critics have charged the play with being "sentimental" and I think it is, and I don't think this is a negative attribute at all. We should be sentimental about the things we love, and what a sad existence one has if they don't love life. The real punch from this piece though is not from its sentimentality, but rather from the fact that we realize that we don't do what Wilder is urging us to do, even though we know we should. Late in the play, the recently deceased Emily says "We don't have time to look at one another." If that was true in 1937, imagine how much more true it is now! And we know what she says is true, and we want to amend it, and for the most part...we don't. There is no greater tragedy then knowing the correct way to do something, and then finding that we don't do it. "Our Town" painfully reminds us of this fact of life.
This play is worth reading, then reading again, and after another interval, reading again. Unlike many works of drama, it is a satisfying reading experience, regardless of whether or not you see it as a performed play.
As one character says, "I can't look at everything hard enough". "Our Town" does its best to get us to look at the things around us, and to appreciate them. It is a lesson worth returning to over and over again in life.

By most accounts Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) considered himself a teacher rather than a writer--a curious situation given than he won numerous literary awards, including three Pulitzers. Among these prize-winners was OUR TOWN, first staged in 1938. It is generally considered to be the single most famous play written by an American author, and Samuel French Inc., which holds the amateur performance rights, states that it is performed at least once a day somewhere in the world, as popular abroad as at home.

The play is perhaps most widely known for the way in which it is staged. The stage is bare. A few chairs, stools, tables, and ladders are used to indicate a kitchen, a bed room window, a soda fountain, a cemetery and other locations; the actors mime use of imaginary glasses, plates, bowls, satchels, and boxes.

The story is equally simple. The first act introduces us to the town, Grover's Corners in New Hampshire, seen in the early years of the 20th Century--and most particularly to the Gibbs and Webb families, who live next door to each other. The second act finds boy-next-door George and girl-next-door Emily marrying, and a flash-black shows the audience how their romance began. It is a simple tale, full of details of small town life, church choir on Wednesday night, milk delivered fresh each morning, breakfast to be made, chickens to be fed--and slowly, as the action moves forward, we are drawn into this simple way of life and its seemingly endless and trivial repetitions.

Wilder swirls a number of themes throughout the work, themes that are simple yet profound, details of the particular and the universal--and these gather suddenly, unexpectedly in the third and final act, which comes as a shock after the charming ease of the play. Emily has died in childbirth and she takes her place in the cemetery among the dead, all of whom patiently wait and watch for something which is not yet clear, the minutes passing one by one into eternity, their memories of life fading into nothingness, a portrait of darkness that is yet somehow still seeded with light. It is here that Wilder makes his ultimate statement: who are you when you have been shorn of all earthly details and devices? Where do you exist within the mind of God?

Many non-theatre people find playscripts difficult to read, and in truth playscripts are a blueprint for directors and actors and not intended as reading material for the general public. This is preface to the very basic statement that some plays "read" well and some do not--and that this is not necessarily an indication of how the play actually performs. On the page, OUR TOWN reads a bit flat; it seems a shade obvious, a shade ordinary. On the stage, however, it easily one of the most delicately beautiful constructs imaginable, a play which demonstrates the beauty and value of each life--no matter how ordinary it may be. Remarkable stuff and strongly recommended.

GFT, the store Reviewer

Our Town is one of the twentieth century's greatest dramas and one of the most influential of all-time - one of very few plays that truly changed how people think about theater. Thornton Wilder was tired of conventions and boldly tried to write a play that could really stand on its own without a set and with minimal scenery and props. This required miming - a huge gamble that could have come off as disastrously implausible and corny. However, the play became a sensation, won the Pulitzer Prize, and has had a profound influence. As all this suggests, it truly must be seen to be fully experienced and appreciated - not because of theatrical touches, as nearly always in such cases, but because it relies more than nearly any other play on acting power. Indeed, its full strength does not come across even in performance unless the acting is superb. Its many revivals and adaptations have thankfully attracted some of the most talented actors for over seventy years, but this is little help to those merely reading the play. It is all too easy for the play to come off as flat on paper, and the miming instructions can be particularly off-putting. However, though reading can never convey the full gamut, the greatness is such that much of it comes across even here, making the play well worth reading for those unable to attend a performance or who want to read it after seeing one.

The plot is almost as simple as the presentation; it begins by depicting everyday life in a small New England town and proceeds to show representative life events there, namely love, marriage, and death. Characters are archetypes, almost stereotypes, representing time-honored small town American ideals. Much of the play is not dramatic at all in the usual sense, simply showing mundane interactions. Even the ostensibly most dramatic scenes are meant to be very familiar; there is nothing even resembling a twist, and it is safe to say that the whole plot is easily recognizable to nearly all Americans, whether personally or from idealized depictions. All this sounds very boring and almost certainly would be in lesser hands, but Wilder's handling is masterful. The play celebrates the banal - everyday events that few think anything of but that after all make up most of our lives. The message is also equally obvious - we should embrace rather than ignore such moments because life can end at any time; we must make the most of what we have before it is too late, especially as many lives are made of little or nothing more than such moments. This again sounds almost unbearably clichéd, the dramatic equivalent of a Hallmark card, but Wilder's artistry again saves the day. The play is suffused with great emotional intensity that at times becomes near-unbearable; it is one of the most affecting dramas ever despite the lack of highly wrought pathos. It moves us precisely because it is so familiar - or did; many initial viewers were moved precisely because they saw so much of their own lives, reacting - and perhaps afterward adjusting - accordingly. However, the realism is now almost entirely of historical interest, and the play is indeed valuable as a snapshot of rural New England life in the early twentieth century, not least in showing how centuries-old traditions were rapidly changing as well as consequent effects. Urbanization, immigration, commercialization, mass media, technology, and numerous other factors have made Our Town's world all but unrecognizable. It now comes off as almost quaint, which in a way adds a further emotional layer if we see it as an unintentional lament for a dying life. Yet none of this really matters, because such elements are really just vehicles for the profound depiction of elemental human emotions at the play's core. The final scene is one of the most sublimely poignant anyone is ever likely to see, throwing life's ups and downs into stark relief against death's undeniable ubiquity. Different as the characters may seem from us, they have the same basic thoughts and feelings - nay the same that human beings have always had and will continue to have as long as they are human. The play will surely remain relevant and affecting for this long also, regardless of superficial changes.

Yet, for all this, it is easy to exaggerate the simplicity. Wilder has been called an unfashionable optimist, and his work is certainly at least relatively optimistic beside most twentieth century drama and other art. However, he was not blind to life's dark side, as shown here by the drunkard serving as the mouthpiece for views that even the staunchest idealist should not ignore. Also, despite the general primitivism, Our Town is a very modern play in some ways. This is clearest in the important part of the narrator, a character fully aware of his fictional status who interacts with the audience and otherwise behaves in ways distinctly opposed to traditional drama. The last act is also notable for what might be called supernatural elements, dropping realism for a sort of poetic fantasy that, while very different from the first two acts in style, is much the same in spirit. Such things are an interesting contrast to the otherwise mundane realism, making the play significantly more complex than is usually noted.

In the end, though, the intense emotion at the play's heart carries it, making or breaking it onstage depending on acting and working to varying degrees on paper depending on readers' sensibilities. It seems safe to say that the play will touch everyone in some way, but some may not think it lives up to its reputation in purely literary terms. However, everyone interested in drama must experience this supremely influential classic in some form. As in life generally, we must not let the opportunity slip away...

Ignoring the conventions of time, this playful "message play" follows one family from the days of the glaciers and dinosaurs to a post-apocalyptic, modern world. George Antrobus, the inventor of the wheel, and Maggie, his wife, the inventor of the apron, have two children, Gladys and Henry (whose previous name was Cain). The bossy father, domestic and subservient mother, aggressive and dangerous son, and innocent daughter interact, often humorously, onstage and are also seen through the viewpoint of Sabina, the flirtatious maid. As the play progresses through the eras, Wilder raises questions about civilization and values. George, by Act II, is convinced that the world is made for pleasure and power, but by the final act, after a world cataclysm, the family confronts what is truly important in their lives.

A pet dinosaur and a wooly mammoth, the Boardwalk of New Jersey and the Miss America contest, the fraternal Order of Mammals (of which George is President), and the attempted seduction of George and his fellow Mammals by predatory women all add to the visual appeal of this production. Though the play pretends to be traditional in its dramatic structure, it takes liberties with the audience as the various actors step out of character to address the audience, as does the director. At one point Sabina refuses to play a scene, summarizing it for the audience as the director and George plead with her.

First produced in 1942, the play reflects Wilder's fear that the war then engulfing the world might truly be a war for the future of civilization. His conclusion, which highlights the values of western philosophers, such as Spinoza, Aristotle, and Plato, also reflects his religious beliefs and his belief in the enduring values of (western) literature. "We've come a long way--we're learning," he says, hopefully, but he also reminds us that "the end of this play isn't written yet." Creative and original in its day, the play represents a major moment in American theater. Less innovative now, more than sixty years later, it still offers food for thought in its reminder of enduring values and its questions about what we value and would save from our own lives in a similar cataclysm. Mary Whipple

"Live that you wouldn't be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip." ~Will Rogers

I have never read or seen this play so I didn't have any expectations going into it. I am on the fence. There is so little that happens that you really don't care about the characters; however, Wilder does such a good job of expressing emotion and getting you to think with so few words, that's it hard not to like. It's amazing how different this play is when compared to his novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It really shows Wilder's talent and diverse writing style.

I did like how the play skipped around in time, going forward to the future, and then back in time to give some background information. I also enjoyed how the stage manager would interrupt a scene and talk directly to the cast. I am sure that brings comic relief on the stage.

The play has three acts. Act I is dubbed, "Daily Life", Act II is "Love and Marriage" and as Thornton says you can imagine what Act III is about. He really makes you ponder and appreciate your life. As Wilder says, "The play is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life." The way he does that though is by making the after life so miserable that you don't even want to think about your happy life on Earth. No thank you.

The more I think about the play, the more I like it. I may need to go back and read it when I get closer to Act III in my life. I now need to go check my local theater listings.

Being a music major, I missed out early on a lot of the classics. I'm trying to make up for that today, now that I call myself a writer. No need to go into the meat of the play--it's all over the reviews. I circled the speech of the choir director: "Now look here, everybody. Music come into the world to give pleasure.--Softer! Softer! Get it out of your heads that music's only good when it's loud. You leave loudness to the Methodists....." Maybe that was true in the days the play was written, or maybe it was an attempt at humor. I chuckled, at least. I'm a United Methodist. I think I'll follow this by reading Sinclair Lewis's Main Street and see the difference.

Ignoring the conventions of time, this playful "message play" follows one family from the days of the glaciers and dinosaurs to a post-apocalyptic, modern world. George Antrobus, the inventor of the wheel, and Maggie, his wife, the inventor of the apron, have two children, Gladys and Henry (whose previous name was Cain). The bossy father, domestic and subservient mother, aggressive and dangerous son, and innocent daughter interact, often humorously, onstage and are also seen through the viewpoint of Sabina, the flirtatious maid. As the play progresses through the eras, Wilder raises questions about civilization and values. George, by Act II, is convinced that the world is made for pleasure and power, but by the final act, after a world cataclysm, the family confronts what is truly important in their lives.

A pet dinosaur and a wooly mammoth, the Boardwalk of New Jersey and the Miss America contest, the fraternal Order of Mammals (of which George is President), and the attempted seduction of George and his fellow Mammals by predatory women all add to the visual appeal of this production. Though the play pretends to be traditional in its dramatic structure, it takes liberties with the audience as the various actors step out of character to address the audience, as does the director. At one point Sabina refuses to play a scene, summarizing it for the audience as the director and George plead with her.

First produced in 1942, the play reflects Wilder's fear that the war then engulfing the world might truly be a war for the future of civilization. His conclusion, which highlights the values of western philosophers, such as Spinoza, Aristotle, and Plato, also reflects his religious beliefs and his belief in the enduring values of (western) literature. "We've come a long way--we're learning," he says, hopefully, but he also reminds us that "the end of this play isn't written yet." Creative and original in its day, the play represents a major moment in American theater. Less innovative now, more than sixty years later, it still offers food for thought in its reminder of enduring values and its questions about what we value and would save from our own lives in a similar cataclysm. Mary Whipple

Ignoring the conventions of time, this playful "message play" follows one family from the days of the glaciers and dinosaurs to a post-apocalyptic, modern world. George Antrobus, the inventor of the wheel, and Maggie, his wife, the inventor of the apron, have two children, Gladys and Henry (whose previous name was Cain). The bossy father, domestic and subservient mother, aggressive and dangerous son, and innocent daughter interact, often humorously, onstage and are also seen through the viewpoint of Sabina, the flirtatious maid. As the play progresses through the eras, Wilder raises questions about civilization and values. George, by Act II, is convinced that the world is made for pleasure and power, but by the final act, after a world cataclysm, the family confronts what is truly important in their lives.

A pet dinosaur and a wooly mammoth, the Boardwalk of New Jersey and the Miss America contest, the fraternal Order of Mammals (of which George is President), and the attempted seduction of George and his fellow Mammals by predatory women all add to the visual appeal of this production. Though the play pretends to be traditional in its dramatic structure, it takes liberties with the audience as the various actors step out of character to address the audience, as does the director. At one point Sabina refuses to play a scene, summarizing it for the audience as the director and George plead with her.

First produced in 1942, the play reflects Wilder's fear that the war then engulfing the world might truly be a war for the future of civilization. His conclusion, which highlights the values of western philosophers, such as Spinoza, Aristotle, and Plato, also reflects his religious beliefs and his belief in the enduring values of (western) literature. "We've come a long way--we're learning," he says, hopefully, but he also reminds us that "the end of this play isn't written yet." Creative and original in its day, the play represents a major moment in American theater. Less innovative now, more than sixty years later, it still offers food for thought in its reminder of enduring values and its questions about what we value and would save from our own lives in a similar cataclysm. Mary Whipple

"Live that you wouldn't be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip." ~Will Rogers

I have never read or seen this play so I didn't have any expectations going into it. I am on the fence. There is so little that happens that you really don't care about the characters; however, Wilder does such a good job of expressing emotion and getting you to think with so few words, that's it hard not to like. It's amazing how different this play is when compared to his novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It really shows Wilder's talent and diverse writing style.

I did like how the play skipped around in time, going forward to the future, and then back in time to give some background information. I also enjoyed how the stage manager would interrupt a scene and talk directly to the cast. I am sure that brings comic relief on the stage.

The play has three acts. Act I is dubbed, "Daily Life", Act II is "Love and Marriage" and as Thornton says you can imagine what Act III is about. He really makes you ponder and appreciate your life. As Wilder says, "The play is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life." The way he does that though is by making the after life so miserable that you don't even want to think about your happy life on Earth. No thank you.

The more I think about the play, the more I like it. I may need to go back and read it when I get closer to Act III in my life. I now need to go check my local theater listings.

Being a music major, I missed out early on a lot of the classics. I'm trying to make up for that today, now that I call myself a writer. No need to go into the meat of the play--it's all over the reviews. I circled the speech of the choir director: "Now look here, everybody. Music come into the world to give pleasure.--Softer! Softer! Get it out of your heads that music's only good when it's loud. You leave loudness to the Methodists....." Maybe that was true in the days the play was written, or maybe it was an attempt at humor. I chuckled, at least. I'm a United Methodist. I think I'll follow this by reading Sinclair Lewis's Main Street and see the difference.

Ignoring the conventions of time, this playful "message play" follows one family from the days of the glaciers and dinosaurs to a post-apocalyptic, modern world. George Antrobus, the inventor of the wheel, and Maggie, his wife, the inventor of the apron, have two children, Gladys and Henry (whose previous name was Cain). The bossy father, domestic and subservient mother, aggressive and dangerous son, and innocent daughter interact, often humorously, onstage and are also seen through the viewpoint of Sabina, the flirtatious maid. As the play progresses through the eras, Wilder raises questions about civilization and values. George, by Act II, is convinced that the world is made for pleasure and power, but by the final act, after a world cataclysm, the family confronts what is truly important in their lives.

A pet dinosaur and a wooly mammoth, the Boardwalk of New Jersey and the Miss America contest, the fraternal Order of Mammals (of which George is President), and the attempted seduction of George and his fellow Mammals by predatory women all add to the visual appeal of this production. Though the play pretends to be traditional in its dramatic structure, it takes liberties with the audience as the various actors step out of character to address the audience, as does the director. At one point Sabina refuses to play a scene, summarizing it for the audience as the director and George plead with her.

First produced in 1942, the play reflects Wilder's fear that the war then engulfing the world might truly be a war for the future of civilization. His conclusion, which highlights the values of western philosophers, such as Spinoza, Aristotle, and Plato, also reflects his religious beliefs and his belief in the enduring values of (western) literature. "We've come a long way--we're learning," he says, hopefully, but he also reminds us that "the end of this play isn't written yet." Creative and original in its day, the play represents a major moment in American theater. Less innovative now, more than sixty years later, it still offers food for thought in its reminder of enduring values and its questions about what we value and would save from our own lives in a similar cataclysm. Mary Whipple

I received my copy of "Our Town," as a gift while visiting Peterborough, New Hampshire, which is the basis for this well-known play.

This edition contains a foreword and afterword which adds a lot of information about the background of the play, the author, how it was written, some of the politics involved in its early productions, etc.

The following quote by Wilder from the afterword, to me, best summarizes what the play is about: "The play is an attempt to find value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life." I think that's why this play has found universal appeal. It celebrates the small events: birth, love, marriage, death, because in the end, these are the things that define life for most people.

I thought I had read this play in high school, but now that I just finished it, I can't say that I recall it. I'm glad I read it now, more than 40 years after high school. I think some of the subtleties are lost on young adults.

This beloved classic and most frequently performed of Wilder's dramatic works still charms and captivates--despite the decades since its first production in 1938. A simple story, kaleidescopic time (both between and within Acts), basic family values and the modest joys of small town life are the literary elements offered to readers and theatre-goers. Scorning nobles and tradionally heroic figures, Wilder presents ordinary people in the early 20th century--a kinder, gentler time when horses
were being phased out in favor of automobiles. But writers will always cherish the natural progression of the seasons of human existence.
Why are audiences fascinated by the normal,
typical routine in rural New England; what explains the
timeless appeal of this simply-plotted story in three acts: Daily Life, Marriage, Death and Aftermath. Perhaps we are
haunted by the way the Dead (characters in Act 3) speak about and feel for the Living. Do the residents of the graveyard on the hill reveal painful truths about human life and asperations on earth? Why do the Dead mock those still living as blind and ignorant? What are they patiently, quietly waiting for in their
peaceful plots? Is Life just a waste of time, a farce during which we fool ourselves into believing in our own importance?
This tale of Americana belongs to all people, regardless of national origin--by virtue of its poignant insight into the human heart.

By reading the titles of the acts in Thornton Wilder's play, Our Town, it is easy to figure out that the play is about "Daily Life", "Love and Marriage", and "Death". Set in the small town of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire at the beginning of the twentieth century, the play depicts the lives of the Webb and Gibbs families. The minimal amount of action throughout the entire play forces the audience members to focus on the characters and give the illusion that Grover's Corners could be any small town in the United States.

It is May 7, 1901 in Grover's Corners and the Stage Manager, the narrator of the play, is watching the inhabitants as they go about their daily lives. In detail, he goes about describing the town because the scenery leaves much to the imagination. From his perspective, there is really nothing special or unique about Grover's Corners. After delivering a woman's twin babies, Dr. Gibbs stops to talk to the paperboy and the milkman to tell them the good news. Everyone knows everything and everyone in Grover's Corners. At Dr. Gibbs house, the audience is introduced to the rest of the Gibbs family, including young George. At the same time the Gibbs family sits down for breakfast, so does the Webb family who lives next door.

Three years later, George Gibbs and Emily Webb are preparing for their wedding day. The Stage Manager shows up a few more times to take the audience back to how George and Emily fell in love and also serves as the minister at their wedding. Godlike in nature, the Stage Manager can stop the action of the play, interact with the characters, and serve as random characters. Even more years fly by in the lives of the inhabitants of Grover's Corners and many changes occur. The final act of the play opens in the town cemetery during the funeral of one of the characters.

From the birth at the beginning of the play to the funeral scene at the end, Wilder helps show the natural flow of life and the inevitability of death that ties everyone together. A microcosm of simpler times, Our Town is a play that can be enjoyed by anyone, anywhere, and at any age.

If you can distinguish sentiment from sentimentality, and don't flee from both for fear of not knowing the difference, try this play.
Wilder's novels and plays are modern, but backward-looking. And they are "romantic." The whole 20th century swerved determinedly away from romanticism, and especially from any whiff of sentimentality. Sentimentality is a shoddy imitation of a fine human feeling. But in the determined avoidance of mush, many writers have abandoned valid emotions and high human feelings.
Wilder was one of the few authors in the last century who attempted that dangerous ground, who walked toward sentiment with open eyes. And he did so with a craft as solid as Ezra Pound or James Joyce, the great writers who led the swerve away from Victorian pap.
In 8th grade, I didn't know any of this.
The novel "The Eighth Day" is his masterpiece, weaving beautiful symphonic music out of the vaudeville of "Skin of Our Teeth." It's as hard-headed as Ayn Rand and as hopeful as a first love. Among the plays, only "Our Town" rivals it.
You've probably seen "Our Town" already. Somewhere in America, every hour of every day, some high school is acting it. But you haven't seen it. .
It requires the very long view, the ability to swallow the tragedies and still love the fact of life, the texture of it. Wilder served in both World Wars; he suffered an ambivalent sexuality in an America that was intolerant of such things. And he wrote not with the grim "cold eye" of the mature Yeats (who never went to war), but with a warm, loving affirmation of the beauty in the big messy world.

I ordered the book 'Our Town', and paid for express delivery. The book I got was the wrong one! The vendor says it's due to the store's order entry system. While they did refund everything I paid, including delivery, I still had to go elsewhere because they didn't have this book, and, worse, I lost a bunch of time in eventually getting this book.

It's hard to imagine that there's a soul out there who hasn't come across at least one of these plays in the course of public education or personal reading, but if you haven't then you should at least give them a chance and take a look. Plays aren't everyone's idea of pleasure reading, but this collection of Wilder's best-known three are among the best-known one-act plays in the American collection. Drawing at will upon the comic and the tragic -- often in the same breath -- Wilder's plays might have prompted the slogan of the recent (and acclaimed) "American Beauty", which implored viewers to "look closer." These three plays are good discussion pieces, palatable introductions to American theater, and insightful explorations into the potential of the theatrical medium.
A little more info on two of the three:
OUR TOWN happens to have been one of the first plays I ever actually studied in a drama class, and I have particularly fond memories of blustering through the part of Mr. Webb in our dramatic reading. The play, which focuses on the lives of the simple townsfolk in Grovers' Corner, New Hampshire, a dry New England town, begins with an observation of the daily lives of the townsfolk. In the second act, it goes on to portray the romance which develops between George Gibbs and Emily Webb, the young lovers who consummate their feelings in marriage at the end of the act. And in the third act, after Emily dies, she finds herself among the mourners at her own wake. Taken as a whole, Our Town shows the reactions of the austere New Englanders to all possible situations -- they are brought to life, portrayed in times of happiness, grief, and peaceful quiet. In addition, Wilder uses the play to make a statement about the futility of living in the past, and forcing the audience to deal with the concept that just like a show, life must go on. In the end, he says, truth can only be found in the future, which it is still in our power to influence and change. Our lives are our own to live, and we must learn to set our own course while we still can. (Of particular interest in this script is the role of the "Stage Manager", who both interacts with the characters and serves as a quasi-omniscient narrator. I think the idea of having a character exist on multiple planes might have been a Thornton first, at least in some regards.)
THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH is a little bit stranger and more avant garde. In a script unlike anything else that Wilder has ever written (to the best of my knowledge), the audience is presented with a detached look at man's natural reaction to crisis and stress. The play focuses around the Antrobus family, simple representatives of the every family, but with a few significant quirks -- the characters seem to be updated (or perhaps reincarnated) versions of the first family -- Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel -- and refuse to establish a consistent setting. Simultaneously set in the prehistoric Ice Age and on the boardwalks of Atlantic City (and by simultaneously I mean that there is no differentiation between the two), and paying no particular attention to the linear laws of time or space, the play draws upon so many stage and literary devices that it eventually makes the head spin. In a particularly powerful conclusion, the play comes entirely round circle, ending with the same lines on which it began, and implying that the entire cycle is about to repeat itself. And that is exactly the point Wilder was getting at in this bizarre and avant garde production -- no matter how much we change, as we evolve from cave-dwellers to farmers to civilized ladies and gentlemen, the more we stay the same. Our features change, but our natures do not. Both a confusing and intensely powerful piece of dramatic scripting, this play is worth reading at least twice. (To the credit of this script, I remember getting chills just reading it to myself for the first time, during certain climactic scenes.)
As for THE MATCHMAKER... I'm not as familiar with it, but I know it's a popular comic script for amateur theater troupes, and served as the basis for the musical comedy "Hello Dolly", in which a widowed matchmaker decides to take a second husband, and tricks him into proposing to her by making a show out of setting him up with another woman. Clever, but not as experimental as the other two...
All in all, this is a collection of plays that should be read at least once, if only so that you can say you didn't care for them. There's a lot here, and Wilder was a master of the short script, and a pioneer in American theater. Give it a shot -- check it out from your library if you're dubious about purchasing scripts you haven't read -- and see what you think,

... I have recently begun spending time rereading literature that I first read when in school.
The question that I posed to myself was whether the "classics" that I had to read in High School or College still met the test of time.
I am very pleased that my rereading of Our Town not only met, but exceeded my expectations and memory. In my opinion, plays are the most unread form of literature in America. We are fed a diet of fiction and history, even poetry is more often read and studied than plays.
After rereading Our Town it is easy to understand why Wilder won a Pulitzer Prize for this work. Short, only 112 pages, spartan in its set design it left all for the imagination.
This is a play that can be read in a short period of time, and while it seems so simple and easy in Act I, by the end the true depth of meaning has hit the reader.
All of the action takes place in the matter of 12 years, almost a generation, and the changes that have taken place in those mere 112 pages have brought us to character involvement, life, birth, death and deeper meanings of why we are here on Earth.
Our Town means so much more to me than it did when in school, most likely because I, like the play, have aged and not am at a period of my own life where I can look back and see similar fact patterns. Add to that the maturity of age and Our Town is Still a Classic, a play to be read in school, performed on stage and reread every now and then as we age. In doing that we are able to better understand the characters, the emotions and the fact that there is no set or scenery in our mind and can envision the play however and on whatever level the reader so desires.

This is the first worst quality copy I have ever received from the store labeled as good quality used book. The whole book is discolored with cover and two pages torn and many pages wrinkled. It is unpleasant to handle. I will think twice before buying another used book through the store again.

Now, I must admit that I personally thought that the first two acts were very boring. Act One revolved around the average day in a small town in New Hampshire called Grover's Corners. The people are any average people and there is little plot to the first act. In the second act, there is slightly more action when two local people get married. But I did like the end. I wouldn't exactly want to give it away so I won't say anything about Act Three but it is inspirational and it makes you think for a long time after reading it. The small town setting may seem boring, but in my opinion it just gives more meaning to the sending. If it weren't for book reports, I would have never been able to read this classic, and I'm extremely glad I did. Note to ya'll: I gave it four starts because of the first two acts, but the last one makes up for it all.

Superficially a folksy, American nostalgia piece, "Our Town" spans the first thirteen years of the twentieth century in the life of Grover's Corners, a small village in rural New Hampshire. It's the archetypal town of the American Mythology: a place where the names on the oldest gravestones are the same as those of the townspeople today; where the doctor delivers twins before breakfast, and is home in time to shoot the breeze with the paperboy; where the kids share an ice-cream soda, their mothers sing in the church choir, and a girl grows up and really does marry the boy nextdoor. The play's fond recollection of an America that never existed was nostalgic even in 1938, yet Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama became an instant classic and remains one of America's most loved and frequently performed plays. America today is the shambles of a destroyed hope, the stillborn ruins of the way of life "Our Town" imagines but which in reality was never achieved. For those immune to the appeals of the American Dream, or more familiar with the reality of the American Global Empire, the play may seem deliciously rich in unintended irony. You could be forgiven for thinking the American preference for escapist, self-aggrandizing fantasy might account for its enduring appeal. Yet you would be wrong. Scratch the surface and "Our Town" is no quaint tale of hayseed family life. Wilder was an intellectual, an admirer of the avant-garde and the experimental works of James Joyce. Steadfastly minimalist in its presentation, engagingly postmodern in its insistence that we see the cast as actors rather than characters, and more thematically challenging than we are initially led to expect, "Our Town" is a work of social criticism which indicts us with personal responsibility for the way we see our lives. Wilder turns our nostalgia against us, demolishing our vision of the past as a Golden Age, and demanding we live here and now, simply and fully. The play shows ordinary lives in pursuit of universal meaning, and by confronting us with our own mortality it challenges us to explore our small allotment of years in the same way. This isn't so much a play of memories as a play about memory - private and public. It evokes nostalgia to warn against it, and argues instead for an acceptance of transience, a celebration of life while it is lived, and a recognition of that small, unknowable fragment of the self that is eternal. It's with this universalizing, evident in the final act, that "Our Town" transcends twentieth-century America and becomes an enduringly relevant work of art - one about memory, fantasy, and the power and price of both.

Our Town is, i would guess, the most produced stage play in america. You need no props,no singing,no dancing.It introduced of place,Grovers Corners,N.H. into the lexicon. The play though first produced in the late 1930's takes place in the early part of the 20th century. It tells the tale of two families, the Gibbs and the webbs,in love life and death{Wilder never skirted the issue of death in his writings>}Its timlessness lies in the essence of wilders writings: how the simple ,the mundane taken together make us who we are, and how important the quotidian chores of daily existence are. The heartfelt exclamtion near the end of the play asking if human beings ever realize thier lives before it ends? followed by the wise narrator's some saints and poets has stayed with me since childhood. An easy read, though not a simple one.Is this the great american play? Who knows.It is certainly great and good,and stands up very well almost 70 years later. Essential reading,on anyones list.

The vision Wilder offers of the human condition in Our Town is essentially tragic. It is a picture of the priceless value of even the most common and routine events in life and of the tragic waste of life through failure to realize the value of every moment. Unaware of the value of life, the people of Grover's Corners live their lives banally and seldom get beneath or above the surface of life.
The artistic problem basic to Our Town is that of showing that the events of life are at once not all they could be because they are taken for granted--but are priceless.... By relating the ordinary events in the lives of these ordinary people to a metaphysical framework that broadens with each act, he is able to portray life as being at once significant and trivial, noble and absurd, miraculous and humdrum.

The Skin of Our Teeth is one of Thorton Wilder's plays. Although not as well known as Our Town, it certainly holds up its own.

Granted, poetry and plays are not my favourite forms of literature. It's not that I dislike them, it's just that I often lose my patience with them. I also find that there is a greater disparity between the best and worst of both poetry and plays. Rarely do you find something that's in the middle in terms of quality.

I have to admit that I preferred Our Town. Although the plot of this play was certainly interesting - it follows an unusual family that manages to live through all of the world's biggest events - I found it easier to relate to Our Town. The message was great - history repeating itself and whatnot - but it's still second on the list.

There was an amazing humour in these characters though. I loved how they would turn to the audience to issue the occasional sarcastic line. It was clear that this play didn't take itself too seriously, and it was really all the better for that!

A classic! Relevant for all stages in life. It’s a quck read. Something different sticks out each time I read it! Highly recommend! I enjoyed this book in high school, now as a mom in my 30s, and my mother also recently read it and loved it as well!

Like many other people who have read this (and loved it!), it was required. Actually, we were required to watch a filmed stage version of it - starring Paul Newman as the Stage Manager. I found it very difficult to watch. I was, along with many other students, very bored watching that production. So, I decided to just read the play. (Reading the play was not required.) It was nothing short of fantastic and amazing.
I'm not the kind of person who reads plays and enjoys them. But OUR TOWN read almost like a very reader-friendly novel. And its themes of birth, life, and death have a tendency to reach out and grab the reader like few books I have ever come across. I will definitely be reading this again.

OUR TOWN gives us American experimental theater in its most easily graspable form. Once you get the general drift of the thing, you remain interested, for Wilder has planned it so. He gives us a little at a time, like a fisherman letting out his reel, slowly, now, then for yards at a time, once we are hooked. The Stage Manager orders the actors about, and we seem to be let into two different worlds at once: the backstage look at the theater, and also, at the same time, God pulling his puppets from one end of the stage (birth) to the other (the tragic death that ends the play). Thornton Wilder, born in Madison, Wisconsin, grew up in China (Shanghai and Hong Kong) and made a study of Eastern religion at Yale, later at Princeton. All his life he remained fascinated by the patterns of things: birth, marriage, death.

OUR TOWN shows us a different view of small town life. Did you ever take an embroidered sampler off the wall and perhaps turned it around so you could see the back side, the knots and tangles, the rough switches, the mistakes hidden from plain sight? It's not a pretty picture, but without the fortification of error, we wouldn't have the homespun homily on the front side, under the glass. "God Bless This Home." In the play OUR TOWN we see, simultaneously, both sides of the picture. It's scary to turn up the rock and see the underside. Live things wriggle there. And death comes quickly too. As George and Emily maneuever through life from childhood to dating to a wedding, the Stage Manager rushes us through, always pulling at another curtain. What comes after love? More love or no love? OUR TOWN is all about sequence, but it illuminates sequence by asking us to imagine all life and death jumbled up on top of one another as though everything were happening at the same time. And yet still, none of us know, for a single second, the whole ecstasy of even one moment of our own lives.

When first reading this play, it may appear to be about nothing more than the every day life in an ordinary town. However, it is much more than that. This town is representative of any little town in all of America and its actions as something that could have been done anywhere. These simple facts expand the scopes of this play to new heights. It is not just a play about the little events that occur in a small time but is rather representative of life as a whole. Each act represents a stage in life: "Daily Life," "Marriage" and "Death." These words take on new meaning though as the daily life seems so dull that no one would ever want to live there, yet hardly anyone leaves; the marriage is somewhat pushed on George and Emily; and finally, Emily dies along with many other characters who are seen as being more "alive" than any of the living characters in this play. It takes on many unique points of view and teaches many lessons, making it necessary to take it apart completely. The most incredible part is that all of this is contained in a book about "nothing."

One major thing that is pointed out in this play is that people walk through life without ever really seeing anything, and this is shown on many an occasion, not really being noticed until it is too late to do anything about. People that are alive do not have the worries that life will be short because they are still living it. They do not worry about spending each second like it was their last because it is not. They live life on a day to day basis, not worrying about whether or not they live it to its fullest because there will always be more time. The worst part is that life could end at any minute. And when that person has not lived a full enough life, they will have no one to blame but themselves for not appreciating it when they had it. It is often said that people do not miss things until they are gone, and this is one more example. If only people could miss it when they still had it, then losing it would not be such a tragedy because they would have been happy either way.

I love this play. If there is any piece of literature that I wish that I had written, this is it. The play is broken into three acts - the three phases of life. A birth. A wedding. A funeral. Three things that everyone experiences at some point in their lives. With his unique narrative style, Thornton Wilder weaves a story about life in a small town at the turn of the century. Everything is simple, but so wonderfully complicated. The first time I read this play I wept for an hour. I've never read anything outside of the Bible that better sums up the human condition. Anyone with even a shred of humanity will love this play.

Although this play has been over used and analyzed in high school english classes across the United States, it is still a classic play with a great message. People tend to focus on life's milestones but in the end, it is the little things we treasure.

I used the Samuel French script when I played Mrs. Gibbs in high school, and really liked the format of this script. The lines are spaced very well, and there is not a lot of commentary in script itself-which leaves room for the director to make most of the decisions. Although this is a paper back script, mine has stood the test of time. I man-handled mine, had my cast members sign it, the cover never came off and binding is still intact.

I used this as a script for a production of Our Town, but my sister used it in place of the traditional book in her english class without any issues- it works just as well for your reading pleasure.

I love this play. If there is any piece of literature that I wish that I had written, this is it. The play is broken into three acts - the three phases of life. A birth. A wedding. A funeral. Three things that everyone experiences at some point in their lives. With his unique narrative style, Thornton Wilder weaves a story about life in a small town at the turn of the century. Everything is simple, but so wonderfully complicated. The first time I read this play I wept for an hour. I've never read anything outside of the Bible that better sums up the human condition. Anyone with even a shred of humanity will love this play.

Thornton Wilder's Our Town is a very short read, yet it is crammed with tons of wisdom, and real life situations. The play starts out in Act 1 introducing you to two all American families that live next door to each other. As the play progresses, you get an inside look on just who these people really are, and watch them grow and really expierence life as the years pass. They touch base with many memorable situations that we all go through such as the celebration of marriage, and the facts of death that we all muct eventually face. Ending with an unusual twist, this heartwarming yet eye-opening story is truely original.

It’s a regular little town in the US a hundred years ago. It’s an extraordinary little town in the US a hundred years ago. It’s very ordinariness makes it extraordinary. As is, Wilder hints, all life. To walk. To talk. To eat. To drink. And, perhaps most of all, sharing this amazing life with others. Read this play and you will remember to be alive. To everything.

Thorton Wilder's short play, "Our Town," follows the lives of two close knit families, experiencing the different stages of life: birth, childhood, adulthood and death. I recommend anyone to read this play just so they can have the opportunity to read about the phases that others go through. For example, the story mentions the common worries, concerns and yearnings of parent Mrs.Gibbs, who wishes to take a break from the stressful life of being a mother yet she is held back by the contrasting wishes and aspirations of her husband. "Our Town" is filled with amusing yet relatable events of being disciplined by your parents, which remind us of our childhood, such as when George is admonished by his father. Another interesting tale unfolds as we witness a young relationship between George and Emily flourish into a marriage. Their entertaining anxieties while dating, and even getting married, are humorous and thought provoking for young readers. Unexpected turns of events and sudden losses conclude the story, leaving an important message for the reader which is, care and treasure your loved ones while you still can.

Thorton Wilder is one of the best playrights of his generation. This book brings together three of his best plays. "Our Town" which is a play centered around one town, and the way life can change within it. "the Skin of Our Teeth", which centers around one family that is going through all the changes that have ever happened in the world, including the ice age, world war 2, the depression, and so on. And finally "the Matchmaker" which is not the best play, but is still worth reading. Thorton Wilder does an amazing job with character developments and sub-plots, and these three plays really show his genius.

Wilder's Our Town was by far one of the strangest books I have ever read. It was a pretty good book. Set in typical Small Town, USA, Wilder explores how humans understand and under-appreciate the notion of time. The first act is typical, the second act is special, and the third act is monumental. Wilder's style is slightly odd, because when I first read the play, I couldn't completely understand his purpose. It was when I read it the second time I understood that he was criticizing how we as people never understand how to love the lives that we have. It's the lesson we are taught all the time, yet we never seem to take to heart. I know that all plays were meant to be seen rather than read, but this is the only play I've read where I feel that the only way to grasp the author emotion is to actually see the play instead of reading the book. Still, it was worth the read.

'Our Town' at first seems a sweet, nostalgic glimpse of a simpler, more patient time. Wilder is not this simple though. He saw the 'shadow' of Grover's Corners and how it crushed the individuality out a person, making them conform or be punished. Wilder questioned the American values that could give as much as it could take, where the town becomes more important than the individual people within it. Wilder knew firsthand how painful the price could be just to 'fit in.' This play will remain a masterpiece for every millenium, every century, every decade, every year, every week, every day, and every hour -- to paraphrase Wilder's Stage Manager.

I was able to read this book in about 1 1/2 days. It is a wonderful book with three acts. The First Act is called Daily Life. The Second Act is Love and Marriage. The Third is Death and After Death. The book mainly revolves around George and Emily. The characters include Dr. Gibbs, Mrs. Gibbs, Mr. Webb, Mrs. Webb, George, Rebecca, Emily, and Wally. Well the first act sets everything straight and gets you familiar with your surroundings. We find that Emily and George kind of have a thing for each other. They help each other with homework. Then they get married. Then something happens to Emily which I will not say. All in all...great book.

One significant feature of this play is its simplicity in both plot and props. While it carries great meaning throughout, the story does not feature any extreme, earth-shattering events. Instead, it presents the plain, daily occurrences in a normal small town, allowing the reader to follow the story in a simple context. In addition, although the reader undergoes a different experience than the play-goer, it is evident to all that the conspicuous lack of props is a prominent element that further emphasizes the simplicity of the story.

In three acts, Our Town presents a complete view of three different stages of life: daily life, love and marriage, and death. The play focuses on two families, the Gibbs and Webb families, yet it gives a panoramic view of many townspeople's lives in Grover's Corners. More specifically, the play follows the relationship between Emily Webb and George Gibbs. We first witness them in their youth, as they realize their passion for each other. The story then skips forward to their marriage and finally to Emily's death, as she is finally able to witness her life without actually worrying about daily demands. When she is finally allowed to witness life in her town pass by as a spectator, Emily falls into a heavy regret at her wasted life, as she realizes that nobody takes the time to truly look at each other.

Stressing the importance of the simple, daily wonders of the world, Thornton Wilder underscores the appreciation of life due to both its brevity and its inherent beauty. The third act is truly epochal, as it presents the general purpose of the play through the death of Emily; as she relives her 12th birthday, she realizes that no one cares to really appreciate each other or their own lives. Emily, as with every other citizen in town, is too concerned with her own life that she is unable to see the beauty of it, and she ends up missing the most seemingly trivial of things afterwards, such as sleeping and taking baths. Wilder, by contrasting Emily's life with her death, demonstrates the consequences of falling into a state of content and complacency with one's life; instead of blindly following a routinely schedule everyday, Wilder teaches the audience that they must be grateful for the daily wonders of life, as they may be gone the next day.

This is not a good book for those seeking entertaining and action-packed plots. Truthfully, I did not enjoy reading this book until I understood the meaning in the final act. At first glance, the play seems to drag on, depicting the mundane lives of ordinary people. Yet when I got to the third act, I realized that this is exactly how Wilder wanted us to feel: bored in the first two acts at the seemingly simple things in life, yet remorseful in the last act due to the intrinsic ungratefulness of our lives. Anyone looking for play with a relevant, significant message to everyone's lives should pick up this book immediately.

At the December 2010 meeting, the book discussion group at The LGBT Center in NYC had a nice group to READ OUT LOUD and discuss the play "The Skin of Our Teeth" by Thornton Wilder.

Wilder was gay but didn't include gay content or characters in his plays or dramas. Reading the play silently is nice, but at the meeting we read the second act as a play (with a little bit of gender bending required to fulfill a few of the female roles - but it worked amazingly well. Really!). Most of us weren't wild about the play, but we liked it. Reading the play out loud gave us a much better idea of how the play works: its surrealism, its naturalism, its non-sequiturs (that really aren't non-sequiturs after all), its motivation and motion. Also, it's a very complex play, with a play within the play, and commentary on the play within the play.

Generally we agreed that this is a period piece, best understood as a response to World War II and a belief that we'll be better after it's over, just as we've been better after after each previous war or catastrophe. It was nice to talk about the characters, how they changed, yet how they remained the same, and why the play isn't revived very often.

Thornton Wilder's Our Town is an inspiring play about the joy of life. The play depicts the lives of "ordinary people" in the fictional New Hampshire town of Grover's Corners. The play is set in three acts, each representing a different aspect of life entitled daily life, love and marriage, and death. Wilder sets the stage with nothing but two tables and chairs in order to establish the universality of the play. From there, you are transported to a world very similar to your own and watch the lives of two families and a town come together through hardships and happiness. Wilder's love for the past shows through as the setting is in the early 1900's. The play continues as the children of the two families grow up and experience all of the joys and sorrows of life. In the third act, the theme of death is prevalent. The third act pulls together the loose ends created in the first two acts in a philosophical way. A passage from the play that really sums up what Wilder was trying to get across is "Do human beings ever realize life while they live it?--every, every minute?" The characters in the play realize in the end that people rush through life not taking the time to enjoy every minute of it. They don't just stop and look around at the people, at the scenery, and at the world. Wilder's purpose in writing this novel was to inform people of just that, to live each day to the fullest and have no regrets when it's all over and you look back over your life. I recommend this play for anyone who rushes through life without enjoying the simple pleasures. It is short, it reads fast, but most of all, it says something that everyone needs to hear at one point in their life.

"Our Town" could possible have been one of the most well written plays of the 20th century. The play itself appeals to every age and gender group, taking no bias. The play is just a plain, old classic. Thornton Wilder's play portrays a small New Hampshire town going through what every living person goes through, the three acts of life. The play bases itself on the human condition. "Our Town" goes through three acts, birth through death. The way that all the in between are described is amazing. Thornton takes you into many Grover's Corner's families and makes you feel almost as if they were your own. Wilder takes you into the daily lives of people in that small town. Although this book lacks any action, the plot makes up for it in its way to make you feel like you are in the play. The beginning of the play starts with introducing all the characters and showing how there small town is somehow prospering. The play goes into great detail to talk about how everyone in town knows each other and there are only a few main families living there. Each family has grown up with the others and has probably married into one of the others. The next act is bases itself mainly on the time when all the children that were talked about in the first have grown up. Going through weddings and many other things the act shows the closeness and genuine happiness of most of the plays main characters. The last act is mainly based on the death of the town. The last act makes the whole play worth reading. Thornton couldn't have done a better job portraying these small town people as he did. This play is definitely a classic and should be looked at as a masterpiece throughout the rest of time.

First off, this is not the kind of play anyone would normally expect. While it is composed of the essential characteristic of a play, such as scenes and dialogues, there is a new and different idea mixed into it. The Stage Manager plays a major role in directing the play, organizing which scenes are to come next and cutting short scenes as he feels necessary. The Stage manager can be considered the director of the play. However, the Stage manager fulfills another role. He directly speaks to the audience, informing them about each scene's background or characters. Thus the Stage Manager stands on the border of the stage and the audience, sort of like straddling the border by interacting with the audience and assuming different roles within the play itself. It is truly unique.

What I also like about this book is that it is able to take the cliché concept of "cherish what you have" and present it or argue it in such a manner so that it is refreshing almost. The characters in the play, as normal and everyday as people can get, pass through their lives so fast that they don't seem to realize the importance and value of everyday life. They can, in most aspects, represent who we are. We can easily fit into their shoes and see through their eyes, and so it is fairly easy for readers to understand to treasure everything that they have before them, no matter how small or how big.

Yet this book is boring. Even though the boring, everyday plot plays a crucial role in the development of the overall argument, it is, nevertheless, a boring read. There are no special events or some wowing, crazy, once in a lifetime phenomenon, just everyday, mundane episodes of the average human life.

Overall, it is interesting to analyze and interesting to take apart, but when it comes to the first read, it is a tough trip.

The play "Our Town" was a well written play, and I would recommend anyone to read it. The play is very short and simple yet you get the feel of what life is like for the characters. I felt like I was another person living with them. I liked how Thornton Wilder divided the play up into 3 acts. I like how he had the settings for the acts: act one being the past, act two being the present, and act three being the future. The only downfall for the play was the ending. I have to day I was very disappointed. Why was it that he had the dead people talking? I also wish that Thornton Wilder would have gone into more detail with Act 2 and describing the wedding between Rebecca and George. Everybody has their daily schedules and for people living in the city, their schedule is different from people living in the country. I believe that this play really made me see the insight into how simple life really can be. We take for granted the little things that we have in life. While reading this play I really realized how important having a grounded community. I liked how Thornton Wilder had the people play the roles of people we see in our community everyday. I also liked how he skipped form family to family to let you know what they were going through. The most unique thing I liked was that he was very simple with the stage manager and stage directions. A good book for anyone to review.

Does Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" refer to the home town of the State Manager and the characters, or does it refer to the home of the audience? I believe it's both.
The play was written in 1938. America was still in the Depression. and people longed for an escape. In the opinion of many film historians, black and white movie-making was at its peak, and its escapes were many. Viewers could see "poor" families who owned two-story houses and had servants; action-adventures heroes who survived cliff-hangers every Saturday; great romances filled with more passion than you could ever see anywhere else; and wartime explosions and gun battles which were still something to flock to on the big screen and avoid in real life. But "Our Town" was none of that. Like the Andy Hardy movie series that began before it and Archie who in comic books was to follow it, ironically in December 1941, it portrayed small town Americana. It was a return to the simple, safe, hometown America that many remembered and no one ever really lived in.
But "Our Town" was also very different. The "realism" that began on stage and then permeated the movie theaters after the experimental days of the pre-Depression wasn't there. The fourth wall had been created, and now was destroyed. Here was a Stage Manager who spoke directly to the audience, skipped through time, told us what had already happened when it would occur years after the scene we were watching, and even brought the dead back to life, at least for a moment.
The form was odd for its time (although in some ways not so different from the presentational, minimal set theatre of Shakespeare's days.) Had the subject matter been two strange people waiting for a no-show Godot, it might have died in obscurity, perhaps to be resurrected years later. But here were characters everyone knew or imagined they did, at least if they were fourth generation Caucasian. Everyone's mother was there, and father, and brother and sister, and milkman and newsboy and boyfriend and girlfriend and husband and wife. In fact, they could see themselves. The characters represented the past everyone imagined they had.
The limited suspension of disbelief required in the first two acts and oddly in the third act still made real one important message: it is the small things in life, the trivial, everyday things that are really important. Ironically, Wilder seemed to argue against his own thesis, showing in the third act how the dead would forget the trivialities and even major events of life and move on. But as we saw when one character relived and then couldn't stand to relive her 12th birthday, the important things in life are a mother's hug, milk delivered to your door, and "food and coffee--and new-ironed dresses and hot baths..." (Act III). As the poet and wise man Solomon said in the biblical book of "Ecclesiastes," power and great wealth are nothing but "vanity" and meaningless, and the important thing is to "eat, drink and be merry."
I believe the theme of the play is best stated in that same scene in Our Town, when the dead character in wonder proclaims, "oh earth, you're too wonderful for anyone to realize you" (ibid). Anyone except "saints and poets maybe" (ibid).
The theme is also reflected in one of the most famous lines spoken in one of the most famous movies of the very next year, the 1939 "Wizard of Oz." After Dorothy flew from her grey home to drop into a wonderful world of color, she returned to find her family, life and farm had really been colorful all along. She learned, and we all felt, that indeed "there's no place like home."

The classic, Pulitzer Prize winning play Our Town was written by Thornton Wilder. Our Town takes place in a small town in New Hampshire named Grovers Corner and is set in the early 1900's. This play shows how life really was in the early twienth century. It also shows the trials and tribulations of a small town. Examples of this is Mrs. Webb having to deal with her daughter, Emily, getting married and George dealing with Emily's death. Some descriptions of the characters is that George is a young man who will do anything to accomplish his goals and ambitions. He has alot of goals such as being a farmer and getting married to Emily. Emily is a young woman who is very smart and she tries her hardest at everything she does. Emily seems to be a very nice and open minded person. Dr. Gibbs is a middle aged man who is willing to help anyone and everyone. Dr. Gibbs seems to be a very good man who never takes a break from work and has many ambitions. One part of the play that helps you understand the play is the part of the stagemanager. The stagemanager knows almost everything about the town. He also gives you details of events that happened in the past and what is happening at that moment in the town of Grovers Corners. This book is very easy to understand. You know that Dr. Gibbs is obviously the only doctor in town, that Emily is one of the brightest girls in her class, and that George really likes Emily. While reading it you will really get into the story, and you wont be able to stop reading it. You may even find yourself acting out some of the scenes. This play is classified as a drama as it tells of Emily as a young child, to marriage, and then ultimately to her death. This play is also a drama because it expresses love, happiness, sadness, and even hate. Every act skips a few years to just show how people change, the town changes, and just how life changes. Our Town is really a good piece of work. I believe anyone who reads this book will really enjoy it. Our Town really portrays life as it really is.

It appears that I am in the minority for not being a big fan of "Our Town". I do not think it is poorly written or an inaccurate representation of the American landscape. My objection is that nothing happened. Writing 101 says that a good story needs a conflict. "Our Town" really has no conflict. It is just a sample of American life in the early 20th century in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire.

If you grew up in a smaller town like I did, you can appreciate many of the nuances of the story. You can see the children of the town grow up, get married, and later die. It is a sad but beautiful sample of life, yet there seems to be no conflict in Grover's Corners. How unlike real life this is.

I gave the play "Our Town" 3 stars, because it was not too exciting. The plot jumps around a lot, skips several years at a time, missing all the action. It takes place in a normal town with normal people, so there's nothing too exciting about it. Also, it's hard to imagine what would be happening on the stage, because we just read it aloud as a class. I think "Our Town" would be better to see then to just read. It seems like it would be very different then any play that I've seen, because not much happens on stage. They use chairs and ladders instead of an actual set, and it's a creative way to get the audience engaged by forcing then to use their imagination. I think I would have given it a much higher rating if I had seen it instead of just reading it as a class. I think the message the book gives is a good one though, and is a good lesson for our age group (high school students). The first day we read this in class we had a substitute that made us act it out, so we were too busy trying to figure out what we should be doing, and reading ahead to figure out what we had to do next to pay attention to what was actually going on. After we just started reading it, each having our own part, it made more sense, and I began to like it more. I think the bad first impression made me a bit close minded to the play.

"Our Town" by Thornton Wilder is a short play about living in a normal town with normal people. Later in the play, two characters named George and Emily, get married at early ages. Getting married at an early age is common in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. At first, the two teenagers feel that it's going to be hard to get to know each other better and to grow to love one another. They end up having a happy life together. The only weird thing about this play when we read it as a class was when the characters started talking out loud when they were supposed to be dead. I thought it was very strange, but other than that the play was pretty good. I recommend this book because the characters are like everyday people who live normal lifestyles. I wouldn't recommend this book to people who don't have any patience. You have to be patient to be able to sit down and slowly move through this play.

Little children. I understand how boring you think this is. In written form it seems to ramble and is "much ado about nothing", however be in or see this play and your mind will change. Much of our lives are "much ado about nothing", but that is the point. Get past the nothing and realize that we are interconnected to all other humans. That is the theme. The show asks us to remember the small things - they eventually will have more meaning. Please re-read this book every five to ten years. It will mean more each time. I have performed this show twice - at sixteen (it meant little) and at 29 (it began to make sense). At forty I will hopefully do it again and if my forty something friends and seventy something parents are right - it will just get better the more life experience you gain. Please re-read or see it before you decide it "sucks"

This play, to me, was very thought provoking and is very easy to read. Granted, the action in this film isn't quite to MacGyvre status. For instance, the main action in the book is a wedding that is hardly developed and twins being born that never really get brought up again. I think this is a very good depiction of small town american life. This plays best attribute is being very simple, easy to read but also brings up a lot of life's questions that all people should ask themselves. This play was extremely good for me to read knowing that I'm going to college next year and knowing that life is going to change drastically.

The characters are far from developed but you get to know them just enough so you know exactly what they're going through. The lack of character development, though, makes the book much more easy to handle. With the void of action in the book, if it went into more (or any for that matter) about the characters, I don't think any sane person would be able to sit down and read it.

Overall I gave Our Town 3 stars. I felt it was mediocre. It didn't have that many exciting parts, but it was not that dull for the most part. My 1st exposure to the play Our Town was by a crazy substitute teacher that made us act out our practically imaginary parts. I found it ridiculous and quite boring. As we started just reading the parts then I looked into them a little more and found out the deeper meaning to the book. Well as deep as is possibly went. I think that this book would mean a lot more to me if I were older. It talks about how we waste so much of life and it goes so fast so we go fast with it, that we don't stop and enjoy things once and a while. I think I will remember this book after I'm dead and realize how meaningful it is. Until then it was kind of a comical waste of time

This is Thornton Wilder's masterwork--a little play, as he wrote, with all the big things in it; and a big play with all the little things in it. It's a quiet and gentle piece (all to easy to consider "boring," as some have below) which nonetheless packs unspeakable power in its assertion. Life, Wilder argues, is far more precious than we usually make it; we are most often too caught up with the "big" stuff, the scenery of our lives, to notice the small, human details that really do matter. When this play works, it enables us to see life through different eyes than we did before; it shows us something that we already knew but that we did not know that we knew. Earth, you *are* too wonderful for anyone to realize you. Thank you, Mr. Wilder.

I would have to say that Our Town is one of the best plays I have read. I thought it was really good in the beginning and then the pace slowed down a little at the end of the first act and through the second. But now, it's picking the pace back up. If you're looking for a summary of the play, Our Town is about a small town in New Hampshire. The play goes through the lives of the people in Grover's town, this small town. In particular, twon families, the Webb and the Gibbs. George Gibbs, who is the oldest son of the Gibbs family marries Emily Webb, the oldest daughter of the Webb family. The play is composed of three acts and goes through the ups and downs of these two families. Focusing, on Emily and George. I would recommend this to someone who wants an easy reading well developed flowing read. Our Town reads very quickly but yet, goes into detail.

I just saw the revival of "The Skin of Our Teeth" for free as part of the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park, and I can't begin to tell you how extraordinary it was! I immediately ran out and bought the play, in this edition of "3 Plays," and hearing it again in my head, I'm convinced that this is one of the best American plays I've ever come across. It is crazy and funny and complex; it reaches the heart and asks profound questions, from the meaning of life to the boundaries of theatre. Depicting the resilience and perseverance of the Antrobus family, who, along with their maid Sabina (a great, great part), represent all of humanity, "The Skin of Our Teeth" reminds us that, in spite of war and flood and all misery, "we have to go on for ages and ages yet." An awesome play.

Probably the most misread work since the Bible.
These are great little plays, but for some reason anything that gets so thoroughly co-opted into popular culture (as these oft performed plays are) loses all literary value.
I highly recommend that anyone who hasn't seen the Kirk Cameron/ Growing Pains production of Our Town already to read these.
This collection is a wonderful exposition on the human condition. I was giddy for a week after first reading it.

As I was reading this book in English class I noticed that it was a great book for high schools to read. It has a strong them of living for the moment. I thought that as a high school student that it was some thing I should take to heart. This book packs a whole lot into a little space. As we read the book, we were assigned parts. I believe that that contributed to my better understanding of the book. I do not know if I will read this book again but I know I would love to go and see the book as a play. All of the stage directions in the book didn't not make sense when we read this book in a circle. Wilder went to great lengths to capture the feeling of the small town feel that makes this book successful. All of the people in the play work perfectly with one another and are well developed given the short length. While this book is a decent story that will make you think, I think it lakes the certain something to make it stand out as a book.

I first saw this play acted out by my high school's drama class...and I loved it. I read the play earlier this year...and loved it again. It's set in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, and the "stage manager" (narrator) gives you the details of the character's lives. I was glued to this book the entire time...I even cried at the end. Even if you don't like to read plays this is a good one to read. Not only is it one of those books that everyone thinks you should read, it's a good story. I would recommend this to every high school student who is looking for a break from all the other "literature" we're expected to read, and to everyone else who is just looking for a fairly short, but inspiring read.

"Our Town" is a book about a little town where every one knows every one else. What ever happens or goes on in one house hold is every one else's business. In this town when children get married off they are traditionally married off young, and when I say "married off" I mean at a young age a family may some times arrange the marriages for their children. When some one gets married they move out of thier safe nests at home with thier families and move away to start their own family and make a new home away from home. Only the home they make usually seems to be just a few minutes away from their old home just in case they need something or need help. The town in this book is a simple quiet town nothing too exciting, nothing too horrible, nothing you might see in a T.V. show. Just a "normal" little town with "normal" people. I liked this book because it shows how people really are and it doesn't sugar coat things or make things more drastic then they really are. I would recoment this book because I think most people would be able to understand and relate to it in some way.

I found Our Town to be a very thought provoking story/play. Although it is very short, you learn an incredible amount of information about the lives and characters in the story. I think that although the book was based in a time period alternate from our own, the character and plot development could be closely related to our own lives i.e. (George and Emily growing up and developing a relationship). This book, although fiction accurately portrays and relates to our own lives. The ending, although a tad bit obscure, presents a valid and thought-provoking moral to the readers. Overall, I would rate this book with a three only because of the ending, and the lack of overall content. Otherwise, this book was very interesting to read and I enjoyed it.

at my school at the moment we are currently acting out the play. i play the part of mrs webb. the main storyline of the play is my family the Webbses and the Gibbs family. we live next door to each other. our two eldest children fall in love. they get married but it is short lived and tragically emily, who is my daughter, dies in childbirth and she goes back and relives a past day. it is a very emotional pay. it is quite short but there is so much information crammed into the short space. going back to relive her 12th brithday, the day she chose to relive, was very hard for emily to do. george is a baseball playing jock and emily is a hard working nerd but you know what they say opposites so attract.

The first two acts of this play sneak up on you. They are endearing, folksy and sweet. Nothing heavy and you're not sure how this play could have become so famous and popular. But boy, the last act hits you with a shot of existential angst stronger than anything else I have ever read. This is one that probably should be read every year for the rest of your life to inspire better living. Read it and see why!

When I received this collection of plays by Thornton Wilder, I compared some of the text to an original acting script, and found that several changes had been made, apparently to make it more socially "correct". For example, in the introductory monolog to Our Town, the playwright's reference to the people living in Polish Town as "foreigners who come to work in the mill" had been completely deleted. I consider this an example of Bowdlerizing, and a big enough change in the text that it may be illegal. I was very disappointed.

The play Our Town is a fantastic book full of conflict and adventure. It teaches its readers about life and what to do in certain situations. Thorton Wilder did a great job in conducting this play. I had it on one of my summer reading lists for my school and I absolutely adored it. Our Town definately deserves to be preserved over time because it teaches people much about the past.

The first two acts of this play sneak up on you. They are endearing, folksy and sweet. Nothing heavy and you're not sure how this play could have become so famous and popular. But boy, the last act hits you with a shot of existential angst stronger than anything else I have ever read. This is one that probably should be read every year for the rest of your life to inspire better living. Read it and see why!

When I received this collection of plays by Thornton Wilder, I compared some of the text to an original acting script, and found that several changes had been made, apparently to make it more socially "correct". For example, in the introductory monolog to Our Town, the playwright's reference to the people living in Polish Town as "foreigners who come to work in the mill" had been completely deleted. I consider this an example of Bowdlerizing, and a big enough change in the text that it may be illegal. I was very disappointed.

The play Our Town is a fantastic book full of conflict and adventure. It teaches its readers about life and what to do in certain situations. Thorton Wilder did a great job in conducting this play. I had it on one of my summer reading lists for my school and I absolutely adored it. Our Town definately deserves to be preserved over time because it teaches people much about the past.

I marked Our Town as 'Love town' because through reading this novel it seems as though Wilder is trying to portray what most see as the picture perfect American World. Wilder portrays the characters as being the perfect loving family and community when the real world is unfortunately violent, disrespectful, and pretty much the opposite of Wilder's picture portrayed in his writings.
I do commend Wilder for his writings because his writings are portraying what we wish the world would be like to some extent.
As with all books and authors Wilder has many ups and downs in his works.
T. Lynn, Tiffin, Ohio USA

A great book-it brings forth sacred feelings of nostalgia from within your soul, and that's as good a reason for life as any! I wish that I could have written this play, because then I'd be able to maintain the feeling that I'd written a timeless American masterpiece. As it is, I can only write cynical stories about Costa Rican tribes or others about thoughtful turnips. My mind is full of trash. Thornton Wilder's mind clearly wasn't. I wish I could write like him.

Throton Wilder has created for us perhaps the most eye opening, thought provking plays of all time. In just 100 short pages, Wilder has forced us to examine not only what we think about death and the afterlife, but perhaps more importantly, what we think about life. This is a must read for all high school seniors who's lives are about to change in a dramatic way. Wilder will demand that you examine where you are going and more impotantly, why you are going there.

Who says what's a classic and what isn't? This is yet another one of those "classics" that just bores you to death before anything really happens (if anything ever happens). There really was no plot, no suspense, no action, no drama, or plot twists. The whole story was about a bunch of boring New Englanders going about a very boring existence, some going to school, a marriage that wanted to be, yet didn't want to be, that was poorly acted out, and the stage manager just talking nonsense. The story could've gone without the whole last act since at the very beginning of the story, it pretty much begged to be ended.

They may make you read this in grade school, but it has a message for any age. There is perhaps no written work that is so sentimental, but yet undeniably true, than Our Town. Every second of our lives are unbearably poignant and Our Town uncovers this reality that we never see until it is too late. Don't miss this book.

I've enjoyed reading this version of Thornton Wilder's, "Our Town". It's a short, 3 act play but nevertheless is huge in its message. The introduction in this version is helpful and clues the reader to appreciate and look for the deep message of the play. It was through the study of this publication I felt renewed in my love for life! A quick read and well worth the time.

Let me start off by saying that I love plays and was intrigued to hear that this play did not use props or sets. Thornton Wilder purposely underdeveloped the characters and made it lacking, but this was beyond underdevelopment and lacking -- why bother writing a play? The acts are very short, emotionless, and unmemorable and I hated the characters, because they were uncaring. Why "Our Town" is required reading for high school and America's favorite drama, I do not know - I didn't get anything out of it besides boredom and confusion. I do not recommend it.

As I reflect on the playwright "Our Town," I just want to make clear on how good of a message it gave out. The message that I got from the book was to live life to the fullest. You never know when you're going to die, it could be today, tomorrow, or next year. Life is too short, but over all I felt that the book was a great piece of writing. The playwright was well written and the message was put into the writing very well.

This is my favorite book. I love the idea of Emily seeing everyone after she dies and wanting to go back. I usually don't like the to read plays, but this one is an exception. It is really a great book and should be read by everyone

I don't think I could have hated a play more than this. How on earth did it gain so much attention? It wasn't that it was dull or boring. It was more so that I just hated the way it was written. The "stage manager"? I don't get it. One rule in plays that I tend to try to follow is, show don't tell. This play was just always telling us how people felt, they never showed it. I even saw it, to give it a chance. I wanted to walk out I thought it was the worst piece of writing I had ever witnessed, but I paid good money for the ticket, so I stayed. YUCK, YUCK, YUCK! Our Town was DRECK!

this is a very stupid play, i cant understand it, it makes me feel stupid that i say that i need cliffnotes . the cliffnotes are very good for thes people if they need to study for Our Town for exams/finals.

A horrible play. It is about nothing, it's not funny, and there is no sense of time. It is simultaneously a time long long ago and the present. Random things like talking animals and dinosaurs are thrown in for no reason. The characters aren't even clearly defined. It is like they are Adam and Eve and Noah and the President of the United States. Nothing makes sense.

If life is so boring why write about it doesn't that make this book boring. It was pointless and slow with people who need lives and need to get over themselves. I will not recomend this book to my worst enemy.

Thornton Wilder, you piece of overrated scum, I have defeated your crappy play, Our Town. Now that I have read the whole abomination, I am ready to give my full review of it.
Act I: A bunch of village idiots talking about their day.
Act II: A bunch of superstitious village idiots holding a wedding.
Act III: A bunch of pretentious dead village idiots talking about how "blind" humans are, just moving through life without noticing it.
Thornton Wilder, you have no idea. Being pretentious and boring does NOT make you a good writer. I am tempted to exhume your corpse and punch it repeatedly for making me endure this literary purgatory. I have hired the significantly more talented Gene Wilder to burn all copies of your play and replace all future productions with Springtime for Hitler, because it is of higher quality than Our Town. May you learn how to devise plots in the afterlife, whichever place you went. Bad day to you, sirrah.

This book is another one of those someone else is in control of you books. If you are forced to read it I have mercy on your soul because you will die the same fate I did. Spend your time doing better things go see Titan A.E.

This classic of American theater escaped my attention until recently when I saw a production. That experience compelled me to buy a copy of the play. It's not like buying a book to compare it to the movie, where artistic license and requirements of the medium sometimes alter or abbreviate the story. Plays are more fixed. I was curious to see how much of the stage direction was the author's and how much this particular director's. Turns out it was mostly the author's. If you don't know it, this play is deceptive. For two acts you think nothing is happening. It's just the lives of some people in a small town. It is boring. Then the third act grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go. A number of people at the production I saw, men included, were openly sobbing. This play so juxtaposes the banality of daily life against the wonder of that same life that I found the result almost cruel and wondered that children in high school are allowed to perform it. After thinking about it, Wilder's portrayal is fair and honest--and great in its simplicity, and exposes the cruelty of our human fallibility of being unable to see and appreciate every precious moment that we are given. Read it. See it.