‘Our Town’ book considers impact of Wilder’s classic play
The classic American play “Our Town” is one of the most popular in the American repertoire, with incalculable influence on the art form. Thornton Wilder’s masterpiece is the subject of a new book, “Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century,” that explores the play’s impact and enduring relevance while looking at key productions. Connecticut figures prominently.
“Our Town” is considered one of the most important plays of the 20th century, not just for its engrossing depiction of small town life at the turn of the century but for its experimental “metatheatrical” style that tells the story as if it is a play being produced on a stage (as sparsely as possible, with minimal sets and props), gives voice to dead characters, and leaps forward in time. Major playwrights such as Edward Albee (who called “Our Town” “the greatest American play ever written”) and Paula Vogel have named Wilder as a major influence.
“This play can speak to any major event in the world,” from 9/11 to the COVID crisis, says “Another Day’s Begun” author Howard Sherman. It’s in the script’s genes, he suggests. When Wilder was writing “Our Town,” “America was still coming back after the Depression, while the Nazis were rising to power.”
The play premiered in 1938. Wilder had lived largely in Connecticut for nearly 20 years at that point, having moved to New Haven (where his father would work as a journalist) in his late teens, then attending Yale (graduating in 1920) and then to Hamden, where he had a home until his death in 1975.
Sherman, who grew up in New Haven and worked at Hartford Stage, the Goodspeed, Westport Playhouse and the Eugene O’Neill Theater early in his career, generally in management or marketing positions. Now based in New York, he’s well-known
as an arts administrator and theater advocate, who serves as director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School and writes a weekly column for the British magazine The Stage.
The early chapters are full of fascinating “Our Town” factoids, but the heart of “Another Day’s Begun” is the more than a dozen chapters outlining major productions of ‘Our Town,” which Sherman presents as oral histories. He personally interviewed numerous people involved in each production, prioritizing around the directors, the actors who played the Stage Manager and the young heroine Emily, and a producer or artistic director.
The book visits Hal Holbrook’s turns as the avuncular Stage Manager (who serves as the narrator of the day-to-day events, light or dark, in Grover’s Corners) at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven in 1988 and at Hartford Stage in 2007. Holbrook, who’d played the role for an NBC-TV special in 1977, only did it live for those two Connecticut theaters.
Then Sherman turns to what is the best-known production in the book, the 2002 staging at the Westport Country Playhouse which was conceived by the theater’s then-artistic director Joanne Woodward as a response to 9/11, starred her husband Paul Newman, was directed by James Naughton and featured several cast members who — like Newman, Woodward and Naughton — made their livings in Hollywood or on Broadway but lived year-round in Fairfield County. An added bonus: Thornton Wilder himself had played the Stage Manager at Westport Playhouse in 1946.
One of the actors at Westport was Frank Converse, who tells Sherman “My ‘Our Town’ score is two Holbrook, one Newman. I did one with Hal at Long Wharf, and then, in ‘07, we did it again at Hartford Stage. With Hal, I always played Editor Webb. With Paul, I was the doctor.”
Newman died in 2008, but Sherman gained access to extensive video interviews the actor gave when the show was done in Westport and later on Broadway. (It remains the most recent “Our Town” to have been seen on Broadway.) Among his insights: “My job was simply to find the way to create the narrative of the play, and I gave myself one word: which was to seek. To seek the expression, to seek the vocabulary, to not have the language available to me as a kind of recitation. To give the audience possibly even the idea that his narration would change every night, depending how things struck him in a scene, or to tell the story differently or to have a different emphasis.”
Sherman saw many of the productions he wrote about firsthand. For some, he saw archival videos. Some he saw more than once, and still finds revelatory. “I only emotionally broke down the second time I saw Cromer’s production,” he says.
He thinks “Our Town”’s legacy as a play done by every high school or community theater group in the country has affected its reputation. The oral histories he’s compiled bear that out. Some of the interviewees express surprise at how deep and moving and complex they found the play when they first read it. Then there’s “Our Town”s transcendent third act, which takes the homespun family life foundation of the first two acts and shifts it into the cosmos, playing with concepts of space, time and mortality.
“A lot of what I learned about ‘Our Town,’ ” Sherman says, “there wasn’t room for in the book.” That goes for both his exhaustive research and his interviews. He says he transcribed 1.2 million words for the oral histories, which he boiled down to around 113,000 words for the book. For the ‘influences’ chapter, he had to leave out all the songs and artwork he found that related to the play.
He clearly has more than enough material for another book on the subject of what he casually describes as ”one of the most popular plays in the American repertoire.”
But Howard Sherman sees “Another Day’s Begun” as the jumping off point for others, not a cottage industry for himself. “I hope this will prompt other ways of looking at ‘Our Town.’ This play encompasses multitudes. It encompasses the earth.” And, he might add, it encompasses Connecticut.