Thornton Wilder's OUR TOWN has been presented more often than any drama in the history of the American Theater. Since its 1938 premiere, every single day of every year - somewhere in the United States - there is a version of OUR TOWN being rehearsed or performed. This semester the Studio IV Drama students and I set out to investigate OUR TOWN's enduring appeal and to develop our own critical and compassionate production of it.

After nearly a semester's worth of research, presentations and projects, rehearsals and soul-searching, we've found that for a play that has been described as a "simple portrait of small town America." OUR TOWN is actually an extremely complex and difficult piece of work. Far from being the sentimental and sweet love letter to "the good old days," the play portrays a world as troubling and complicated as the America we encounter today. The play is tough, and often very bitter. Issues familiar to contemporary life abound: painful and stunted relationships between family members, suicide and early death, social injustice, substance abuse, the loss of our young people to foreign wars, the legacy of racism, and the tremendous pressure of living in a culture that can seem to value material success and conformity over individual freedom, are as vivid in OUR TOWN as they are for us now. The students and I began to wonder if Wilder's play, in fact, seeks to question our nostalgia for the past by tearing away the small town, Christmas card façade. Is Wilder exposing darker, more complex and human truths, and thus revealing an America less mythologized and closer to an actual representation of the multiplicity of motives and desires that have always defined us?

Yet the play is also more than a critique or expose. It contains a deep compassion and empathy for the human condition. As the great actor Hal Holbrook, who played the Stage Manager in a famous 1977 production said, "You can't do this play without love for the people in it - all of them." And so one of the questions we have been asking ourselves throughout this process is how do we account for both the beauty and the ugliness in OUR TOWN? How is the play critical and compassionate at the same time? 

Discussing his objective in writing OUR TOWN, Thornton Wilder said, "the play is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in out daily life." Herein lays the play's enduring appeal, as well as the wellspring of both its criticism and compassion. As Emily says in Act III, "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it - every, every minute?" OUR TOWN is the most popular play in the American Theater because it tells us what we know is true, but cannot seem to accept - that what is most valuable in life is the day-to-day love and care for others. True attentiveness and presence to our lives and to other human beings is valuable above all price. Using a critical compassion, Wilder manages to gently turn our love for nostalgia against us, subverting our idea of the past as "the good old days" and asking us to take responsibility for the way we see and live our lives now. He warns against living a life of "ignorance and blindness." The dead choir director in the graveyard scene describes such a life: "To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another." The play implores us to move beyond our selfishness, fears, assumptions, and prejudices so as to live more simply and fully in the present moment.