Filmed performance of Our Town

I found a great performance from 1989 Lincoln Center production. This video can be seen on www.youtube.com by clicking on following link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLWewZO6z1w.

This is just Act 3 but as I find this act the most important, I can judge by this extract. I find this production excellent! To be honest, I found this video a month ago and I got inspired by it. This was the moment when I realized that the best way to present Our Town is to show Emily’s heart-breaking monologue. And personally, I felt that this play really spoke to me (much more than reading this part). The acting of Emily character deserves a prize. 

Quotes from the play

As I already stated several times, the play Our Town has its own characteristic beauty. It carries great philosophical questions about life. That is why I chose quotes from the last part of the book that I find more important that the first and second acts.

Emily says in the Third Act “Oh, Mother Gibbs, I never realized before how troubled and how… how in the dark live persons are. “ This quote is the first that shows that when we die, we see that the others who live do not appreciate their lives.

Another interesting idea that the author plays with is that the dead people can return in past and live it again. However, it isn’t that easy. As the Stage Manager says “You not only live it; but you watch yourself living it.” This is one of the reasons why going back to past days is painful and the dead people do not recommend it.

When Emily returns to the day of her 12^th birthday, she is desperate because she wants to tell her mom about the importance of life but Mrs. Webb doesn’t listen. Emily has a heart-breaking speech “Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I’m dead. You’re a grandmother, Mama. I married George Gibbs, Mama. Wally’s dead, too…”. The speech continues and Mrs. Webb responds like she didn’t hear Emily. She talks about a birthday present. I feel that the speech is very emotive and it reflects Emily’s despair and hopelessness.

Another emotive quote is when Emily cannot take the pain of living her 12^th birthday again and talks to the Stage Manager “I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.”. Emily is hit by the fact that she cannot truly live her life, that she cannot change the things and that her life, meaning the run of the individual days, seems wasted and shallow.

This realization is summed by a nice question that Emily asks “Do any human beings realize life while they live it?- every, every minute?”. And the Stage Manager responds by a simple “No” and adds that “The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.” This dialogue seems to bear hopelessness of life and that we actually cannot do anything to “realize life while living it.”

These are the quotes that I find important and touching. This is the reason why I started to like Our Town despite the usualness of the previous parts. 

Task 8: Response to a critical piece

The reason why I chose a review by Oscar E Moore from Talk Entertainment is that I enjoy that Mr. Moore finds the beauty of Our Town in the very true philosophic ideas. Even though what he reviews is not only the original play, but mainly a theatre performance, he concentrates on the best passages of the work that should be appreciated.

The first thing I enjoyed was the phrase “Thornton Wilder must be chatting up a storm with his cemetery friends about this [performance]“, which refers to the Third Act of Our Town that partly takes place in cemetery and the dead characters are having a conversation.

The author of the review masters in summarizing the plot and gently foreshadows the main theme as “in order to love life we have to have life and to have life we have to love life and we should not be blind to what is important. To really look at each other to really listen to one another and to love one another before it is no longer possible to do that.” This might not be very understandable for the first reading but when understood, it carries a great intellectual value.

Only great writers can comment on the universality of this play as following “A thousand years from now this play will still resonate with its real and heartfelt sentiments. This is the way they were, living and dying. This is what is really important. Being happy with your loved ones. How life should be valued. It all passes too quickly.” Using such cogent phrases, he perfectly describes and reveals the power and beauty of this drama.

I identify with Mr. Moore’s opinion on Our Town in spite of my previous comments on the dullness of the book.

The review and the source of my quotes can be displayed by opening this link:  http://talkentertainment.com/c-9346-Thornton-Wilder%E2%80%99s-Our-Town-%E2%80%93-Timeless-Classic-Off-B%E2%80%99way.aspx

Protagonist and Antagonist

The next task should be about protagonist and antagonist. Well, there really are no good or bad guys in Our Town. The only division of people is in the third Act where there are two camps; the dead and alive. Still, they don't fight. 

Nevertheless, the main idea of the play is that LIFE holds us down and we cannot appreciate living our lives. Thus, we can say that LIFE limits our chances to be happy and fulfilled by every single moment. LIFE is the enemy of all people wishing to enjoy every day.

Does it make sense? I might have over-complicated it :D

The Author

Thornton Wilder, the author of Our Town, was born in 1897 and comes from a well-educated family. His father was a US Consul General in Hong Kong and Shanghai. 'Wilder's mother was a cultured, educated woman who instilled a love of literature, drama, and languages in her children" (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/americancollection/ourtown/ei_wilder.html).
Thornton studied Greek and Roman classics, then archeology, and French literature. He became a professor of French and taught poetry at Harvard.
While living in Chicago, Thornton got inspired by a work of his friend Gertrude Stein called The Making of Americans. Grover's Corners is a fictional town. However, it is based on a town called Peterborough in New Hampshire where Thornton used to spend his summers. He was a great philosopher and that is why he decided to write Our Town, a story of ordinary life together with (what I think) great philosophical ideas on life.
And one more interesting fact: Thornton Wilder is the author of The Matchmaker, a play that was transformed into musical Hello, Dolly!

A really cool video

Dear readers, you might have become bored with my usual blog entries. So if you feel like it, you are welcome to watch this video and hear the answer for a quote I had to copy: "How did a seventy-year old drama about small town in New Hampshire filled with average people living unremarkable lives become America's most produced play ?"

As they say, "It is about the everlasting regret of all those moments of life that go unappreciated."
Cool, right?

Live your day as if it were your last one

If I were to say what the main theme of the story is, I would have to say it is life.
The First Act describes everyday life of people in Grover's Corners, the Second Act informs us how Emily and George got together and their marriage (also part of a human life). But the most compelling reason why I think the theme is Life is based on what I read in the Third Act. There are two groups of people--dead and alive. Emily dies and joins the dead. The author brings an interesting thought that we live our lives shallowly and we don't realize how we're wasting it until we're dead. When Emily returns to the day of her 12th birthday, she is disappointed and unhappy because she sees from distance that nobody appreciates the gift of life. She tries to tell her mother that she will be dead in 14 years and that she loves her but Mrs. Webb doesn't listen.
What do you think? Are we wasting our time and realize it when it's too late?