Book Review: Our Town
The promised post is in...progress. IP as we write on the pending logs at the end of each shift. But I have a book review. Or a play review.
Our Town is a minimalist play by Thornton Wilder about Grover's Corners, CT, a fictional, typical American small town at the beginning of the 20th Century. The story skips between events of the life of two people, mostly, Emily Webb and George Gibbs. The truncated, and snapshot story of their life and their town is a masterful analysis of the way that we see live as a series of events, but what really matters is what happens between the events.
The story has a striking style of no linearity of time. The narrator in the first scene introduces the newspaper boy and then proceeds to tell how he dies in WWI. It's almost as if life is a meta-existence. Some similarities to the shadowland theory of C.S. Lewis. Another great play, by the way, is Shadowlands.
I had never read this play before. I saw a movie adaptation in which the character that dies in the end decides that she wants to live again and so does. I didn't know at the time because I had never read the actual play. But it turns out that kind of defeats the purpose of the play. Anyways, I really like minimalist drama. And I know that actors will probably say that's just because I'm a lazy theatre tech, but it's really not. And I just drew a huge comparison between my life as a theatre tech and my relationship to actors, and my life as lab scientist and my relationship to nurses. Totally not important, though. All the same, I really like minimalist drama. I think that it is a good way to really focus on the meat of the play, and stretch the actors, and really stretch the design team as well. It's not easy to make a scene change with only lights. And it's not easy to portray a wedding and a graveyard with the same exact set. It takes a lot of talent to make the same actress into a twelve-year-old girl and a twenty-four-year-old woman using nothing but a hair ribbon because the rest of her costume is the same.
Thornton Wilder liked minimalist theatre in general, but I think it was an especially poignant choice for Our Town. It emphasizes the monotony of life and seemingly unimportance of life, while highlighting the parts of life that really matter.
This is one of those plays that just makes you feel. I like literature that does that.
Five stars for Our Town.
Our Town is a minimalist play by Thornton Wilder about Grover's Corners, CT, a fictional, typical American small town at the beginning of the 20th Century. The story skips between events of the life of two people, mostly, Emily Webb and George Gibbs. The truncated, and snapshot story of their life and their town is a masterful analysis of the way that we see live as a series of events, but what really matters is what happens between the events.
The story has a striking style of no linearity of time. The narrator in the first scene introduces the newspaper boy and then proceeds to tell how he dies in WWI. It's almost as if life is a meta-existence. Some similarities to the shadowland theory of C.S. Lewis. Another great play, by the way, is Shadowlands.
I had never read this play before. I saw a movie adaptation in which the character that dies in the end decides that she wants to live again and so does. I didn't know at the time because I had never read the actual play. But it turns out that kind of defeats the purpose of the play. Anyways, I really like minimalist drama. And I know that actors will probably say that's just because I'm a lazy theatre tech, but it's really not. And I just drew a huge comparison between my life as a theatre tech and my relationship to actors, and my life as lab scientist and my relationship to nurses. Totally not important, though. All the same, I really like minimalist drama. I think that it is a good way to really focus on the meat of the play, and stretch the actors, and really stretch the design team as well. It's not easy to make a scene change with only lights. And it's not easy to portray a wedding and a graveyard with the same exact set. It takes a lot of talent to make the same actress into a twelve-year-old girl and a twenty-four-year-old woman using nothing but a hair ribbon because the rest of her costume is the same.
Thornton Wilder liked minimalist theatre in general, but I think it was an especially poignant choice for Our Town. It emphasizes the monotony of life and seemingly unimportance of life, while highlighting the parts of life that really matter.
This is one of those plays that just makes you feel. I like literature that does that.
Five stars for Our Town.
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