Play was Wilder’s personal favourite
The history of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town helps explain why this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic remains so popular. Here are some facts: • The metatheatrical 1938 play was written as Wilder’s response to the staid theatre of the time. “I felt something had gone wrong,” he wrote. “I began to feel that the theatre was not only inadequate, it was evasive.” It was a problem Wilder confronted with his use of the Stage Manager as narrator, audience and symbol. • Wilder claimed Our Town was his favourite of all his works. • In 1946, the Soviet Union shut down a production of Our Town in the Russian sector of occupied Berlin “on the grounds that the drama is too depressing and could inspire a German suicide wave.” • The first radio play version, in 1939, starred Orson Welles as the Stage Manager. • The 1940 film version changed the story so that the third act was all a dream of Emily’s. • Thornton Wilder is the only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and drama. He won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for The Bridge of San Luis Rey, as well as the 1938 and 1943 awards in drama for Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, respectively. • There has been one operatic version (by Ned Rorem) and two musical versions — the first of which starred Frank Sinatra as the Stage Manager, Paul Newman as George and Eva Marie Saint as Emily. • The longest-running production of the play ran for 644 performances at the off-Broadway Barrow Street Theatre in 2009. Several actors (and director David Cromer) played the Stage Manager over the course of the run, including Michael Shannon and Helen Hunt. • In 1994, Philip Jerry choreographed a ballet version, set to Aaron Copeland’s score for the original film, which has been performed by the American Repertory Ballet several times over the past several years. • Thornton Wilder served in both world wars, rose to the rank of corporal and was awarded the Legion of Merit Bronze Star and the Order of the British Empire for his service to the Army Air Force Intelligence.
He also had an MA in French from Princeton.