STARTING TOMORROW: Sad to say, Our Town!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2020

Hapless and dumb, not well liked: Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town in 1938. The leading authority on the play offers this thumbnail account:

Our Town is a 1938 metatheatrical three-act play by American playwright Thornton Wilder which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play tells the story of the fictional American small town of Grover's Corners between 1901 and 1913 through the everyday lives of its citizens.

Throughout, Wilder uses metatheatrical devices, setting the play in the actual theatre where it is being performed. The main character is the stage manager of the theatre who directly addresses the audience, brings in guest lecturers, fields questions from the audience, and fills in playing some of the roles. The play is performed without a set on a mostly bare stage. 

We've never seen the play, but we watched the 1940 film a few years ago. George and Emily fall in love. At an early age, Emily dies.

Did Wilder have a message to bring in his play about a small New England town from the early 1900s? The leading authority on the work floats this tiny hint of a possible minor clue:

Once the funeral ends, Emily emerges to join the dead. Mrs. Gibbs urges her to forget her life, warning her that being able to see but not interact with her family, all the while knowing what will happen in the future, will cause her too much pain. 

Ignoring the warnings of Simon, Mrs. Soames, and Mrs. Gibbs, Emily returns to Earth to relive one day, her 12th birthday. She joyfully watches her parents and some of the people of her childhood for the first time in years, but her joy quickly turns to pain as she realizes how little people appreciate the simple joys of life. 

The memory proves too painful for her and she realizes that every moment of life should be treasured. When she asks the Stage Manager if anyone truly understands the value of life while they live it, he responds, "No. The saints and poets, maybe–they do some."

Should we the people teach ourselves to "appreciate the simple joys of life?" Life may have been a bit simpler then, at least within the part of the world Wilder was thinking about.

Life may have been somewhat simpler then, though a whole lot of people died young. Today, children drown in the Mediterranean, with their parents, as they try to make it to Europe. Luckily, our cable stars never ask us to think about things like that.

For some reason, we've been thinking about Our Town of late—the movie, not the play. A bit more precisely, and for whatever reason, we've thought about the phrase "Our Town" as we've watched the hapless, sometimes unpleasant behavior of various members of our own failing tribe.

Our tribe is deeply self-impressed. We're also very strongly inclined to be dumb, self-defeating, unpleasant.

As a general matter, we're unable to see these obvious facts about ourselves. According to major anthropologists, we humans are wired to see the dumbness and ugliness Over There—to survey the lives of others, the ones who reside in Their Town.

For the next few weeks, we plan to be exploring some of the behaviors which make Our Tribe so hapless and so little-loved. As we've occasionally noted, our team is silly and stupid and nobody likes us. Casting ourselves in the role of stage manager, we'll push through the firmly resistant fourth wall and undertake to explain why that is.

In fairness, an enormous amount of haplessness can be found in the next town over. But how often do we stop to consider the truth about our own failing town?

For now, we'll skip this discouraging essay. (Before too long, we expect to tackle the topic addressed in that piece.) Tomorrow, and for the rest of the week, we'll be starting right here. Also, in an astonishing number of similar, look-alike neighborhoods.

Why aren't we the people of Our Town better liked nationwide? Tomorrow, and for the rest of the week, we'll be discussing the part of Our Town which comes to the surface right there.

For extra credit only: According to the leading authority, Wilder was pushing back against the era's artistic conventions when he wrote Our Town:

Wilder was dissatisfied with the theatre of his time: "I felt that something had gone wrong....I began to feel that the theatre was not only inadequate, it was evasive." 

Hence his decision to employ "a metatheatrical style." His play's narrator, the Stage Manager, was "completely aware of his relationship with the audience, leaving him free to break the fourth wall and address them directly."

We'll add one last fact about Wilder's play; it doesn't end especially well. Here's the authority's fuller account:

The memory proves too painful for [Emily] and she realizes that every moment of life should be treasured. When she asks the Stage Manager if anyone truly understands the value of life while they live it, he responds, "No. The saints and poets, maybe–they do some." Emily returns to her grave next to Mrs. Gibbs and watches impassively as George kneels weeping over her. The Stage Manager concludes the play and wishes the audience a good night.

For whatever reason—for good or for ill—that's the way Our Town ends.


23 comments:

  1. "Should we the people teach ourselves to "appreciate the simple joys of life?""

    There is no reason why Somerby should look at others and assume that they do not appreciate the simple joys of life. If he does not appreciate his own life, that by no means implies that others do not appreciate theirs.

    The resistance to staying home at holidays usually celebrated with others may be inspired by the loss of a major pleasure for most people -- spending time with their friends and family. This is not the politically motivated mask aversion, but simply ignoring the social distancing rules because they cannot apply to us and our families, and because people cannot imagine their own relatives as carriers of a disease. The simple pleasure we take in human company works against us during this pandemic.

    But Somerby instead uses Wilder's play to beat up liberals, to tell us we do not appreciate life's simple pleasures, to tell us our behavior is corrupt and nasty. Whatta guy! What a complete and total asshole Somerby is.

    My town is not failing. Somerby needs to speak for himself about his town and its inhabitants. His own world view needs work and truly it must suck to be him.

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  2. The play being staged by the Blaine inhabitants in Waiting for Guffman is an homage to Out Town, complete with a narrator who addresses the audience, but it is a musical and very funny. I think it may be a more accurate view of small town life.

    What does Somerby know about small town life? He grew up in Boston, moved to Silicon Valley in CA, then attended Harvard University in Boston, then moved to Baltimore where he has resided ever since. He may represent the kind of nostalgia for small town life experienced by people who have never lived in one.

    To the extent Wilder was using the town as a metaphor, it isn't really about small town life anyway. Somerby doesn't seem to want to think about the deeper aspects of the play anyway -- just using it to bash liberals, much as he used Carlotta Valdes without any regard to her meaning in the film.

    Somerby is name-dropping again. This time it is Thornton Wilder, another name from high school required reading lists of the 1960s. But he might actually have to read the play to talk about it more intelligently and he clearly hasn't done that.

    Like Carlotta, Emily is risen from the dead to warn the living. If I were a friend or loved one of Somerby's, I might worry about his grim fascination with dead women who come back to haunt the living. I might worry about who has been haunting Somerby and why his musings are so dark in the midst or reading a play that tells us to focus on the moment and appreciate life. Perhaps he is giving us the advice he so badly needs to take himself?

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  3. "Why aren't we the people of Our Town better liked nationwide?"

    Here, Somerby takes the views of conservatives and generalizes them to the entire nation.

    Liberals are not disliked by anyone except conservatives, who assiduously teach their followers to hate and despise liberals (for political gain). But conservatives are far from a majority in this country, declining in the most recent Gallop poll to 39% (Republican or lean Republican) while 50% are liberal (Democratic or lean Democratic).

    https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2020-07-27/americans-who-identify-as-conservative-steadily-declining-in-2020-poll-finds

    Even when someone chooses to affiliate as Republican, it doesn't mean they dislike Democrats. It only means that for the hard-core conservatives and the party leaders who use hate (of liberals, minorities, immigrants, socialists, etc.) to fuel party loyalty.

    Given that stoking such hate is a right-wing tactic, what is Somerby doing in his blog by trying to convince us that liberals are hated? How does this have anything to do with media criticism when he is the one telling us that we are blame-worthy, not the media for repeating right-wing anti-liberal propaganda? Who does Somerby think he is kidding with this crap?

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  4. What does the message "appreciate the simple joys of life" have to do with the rest of Somerby’s post?

    That Wikipedia description and Somerby’s use of it sounds like a platitude, especially when he adds “Life may have been a bit simpler then, at least within the part of the world Wilder was thinking about.”

    Would life in “that part of the world” have been simple if you were black or an immigrant?

    And what about elsewhere? What was going on in small towns in the south in 1901? Lynchings, denial of the vote to black people. So, enjoying the simple things was pretty hard if you were black.

    Even in small town New Hampshire, if you wanted to enjoy a cocktail, you might get preached to by your local minister. If a married couple wanted to have sex using birth control, the Catholic priest would tell them they were sinners.

    If you were gay, as Wilder himself was, you were not allowed to express that publicly. He himself left small town life and became a very sophisticated academic.

    Small town life was just as full of restrictions and prejudice as anywhere else, perhaps more so.

    My point is, everyone wants to enjoy the “simple things”, but not all were/are allowed to.

    I’d also like to know when “they” stopped liking “us.” Is this a recent phenomenon, post Al Gore? Humphrey, McGovern, Carter, Mondale were all defeated in landslides by Republicans, and those Democrats were hardly woke progressives or whatever term Somerby might like to hurl against present day liberals.

    Was it when the Democrats adopted the anti-Vietnam-war stance or incorporated the civil rights agenda into their platform (which began with FDR)? Those things pissed off the “others”, but were they wrong?

    Were we failing to “enjoy the simple pleasures” by securing the vote for blacks, putting a stop to lynching, standing up for gay people, or were we robbing the “others” of their simple pleasures like authoritarianism, conformity, and bigotry?

    And the thing of it is, millions of people vote for “us”, including a majority of the working class.

    Somerby didn’t like Picnic by William Inge, because he thought it mocked small town life, even though Inge was from small town Kansas, where the play was set. Maybe Somerby ought to read Peyton Place.

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    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    2. TDH: "We plan to be exploring some of the behaviors which make Our Tribe so hapless and so little-loved (in "Their Town").

      And in addition to becoming a racist and a gay-hating bigot, nothing would make Somerby more loved and welcome in Their Town than a conversion to one of their favorite forms of behavior, speaking in tongues. He might even become elevated to the level of a Trump "spiritual adviser."

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdfYc5B0geQ

      Delete
  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. You really should see the play. It probably will be produced in a high school theater group near you someime next year. Or...Dustin Hoffman may be playing the stage manager on broadway next year. https://www.nydailynews.com/snyde/ny-dustin-hoffman-returning-broadway-our-town-20200701-j5nzadw555dffjrdfjzawji3ly-story.html

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  7. What a meandering pile of excrement. Precisely whose tribe is it that this idiot identifies with? Shall we place bets on what circa 1970 high school piece of fiction his next diatribe will be weaved around? If you are one of the 70% of Republicans doubting the legitimacy of the last election, welcome to the world of Somerby, where your opinions need to be carefully considered by disdainful liberals. Come to think of it, let’s try to empathize with you while you contaminate your environment by aggressively ignoring CDC guidelines. You need more love and understanding than we can expect from your neck of the woods because Somerby thinks the main problem in this country is that liberals are far too rigid and condescending.

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  8. our town crank speaketh

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