Our Town by Thornton Wilder

Our Town by Thornton Wilder

Comparison of reading and performance

Our Town by Thornton Wilder is a play set in an ordinary town called Grover’s Corner with characters who take the audience on a journey of love, marriage, death and the afterlife. The play has a creative interplay between reality and fiction which lends itself to directorial and designer experiments making the performance a distinct experience to the reading of the play.

The play tends to slip between presentational and representational forms easily. On the surface of the play, the set, stage manager and malleability of actors when on stage and offstage always remind the audience that they are watching a play and that it is not reality. In fact, the play begins with the stage manager making the audience aware that there is another performance next door and that during the interval we must be respectful of this. The production made a conscious choice to clearly make the audience aware on the surface that they were in a theatre space. This was effectively enhanced by the set design. The background was naked and so all the wiring and intestines of the stage were visible throughout the performance. The only attempt at creating a ‘scenery’ is when the stage manager adds trellises to the stage to set the ‘ambiance’ even then keeping the audience aware of this choice.

It’s almost as if the production is mocking the audience with the bare essentials on stage. They challenge us to solely consider the plot as a theatrical performance by laying nothing out for us. However the audience finds it inevitable to associate themselves with the characters in the town. It suggests that a realistic environment isn’t necessary to portray a believable story with an important message. This plays out more prominently on stage than in the reading of the play. When reading the play these efforts of trying to distance us from the town and make it evident that this is fiction are present but don’t seem as...