Event

Our Town

Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning, beloved classic comes to life in the intimate Civil War Drill Hall Theater where the distance from stage to last row is only fifteen feet. Set in the early twentieth century in the small town of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, this play is about the mundane but rather pleasant lives of the Gibbs family, the Webb family, and their neighbors. Act I presents an ordinary day in the life of the town. Act II carries the story forward three years later with the courtship and marriage of George Gibbs and Emily Webb. Act III deals with death and dying. A lead character dies and gets permission to return briefly to life but finds it's not what was expected. It goes too fast, and people don't have time to look at one another. "This is the way we were, in our growing up and our living and in our dying." That's how the Stage Manager, an all-knowing character who serves as the narrator, sums up the play at one point. The Stage Manager knows that Our Town is about a lot more than one particular place at one particular time, and the audience soon begins to sense its mythological dimensions and the story's universal lessons for all of us.