In 1938 the first production of Thornton Wilder’s, “Our Town,” opened in Princeton, New Jersey. It was an instant success. At first someone in the audience might begin to wonder what the play is even about. It begins with mothers getting their children off to school, the milkman making his deliveries, usual small town gossip among neighbors and so on. We cannot fully analyze the play until we have seen the entire story, because only then can we understand the big picture.
Two families are at the center of the play, and we see their daily routines played out before us. As the play progresses, the characters age, the children grow up, and eventually the daughter, Emily, of one family marries the son, George, of the other. By the end of the play, Emily has died during child birth at an early age. This is not the last we see of her however, because now, among many other former characters who have passed on, she is in the land of the dead. She finds out that she can go back to Earth to revisit one day, although the other characters advise against it, saying it will only cause her pain. Emily decides to go anyway, and chooses her 12th birthday to revisit. This proves to be a sad trip for her instead of joyous, as the others had warned her about. She finds that as she misses her family and takes special note of the events of the day, the others who are alive in it go about the day as if it were any other. Emily realizes that no one truly appreciates what they have, nor do they recognize it when it is gone, or past. She herself didn’t recognize it until it was too late, and she was already dead. In the end, she chooses to return to the others in the land of the dead because it is too painful to watch the living.
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