Our Town

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Our Town, drama in three acts by Thornton Wilder, produced and published in 1938. It won a Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1938. The play is considered a classic portrayal of small-town American life.

The play is set in Grover’s Corners, N.H., and features a narrator, the Stage Manager, who sits at the side of the unadorned stage and explains the action. Through flashbacks, dialogue, and direct monologues the other characters reveal themselves to the audience. The main characters are George Gibbs, a doctor’s son, and Emily Webb, daughter of a newspaper editor. The play concerns their courtship and marriage and Emily’s death in childbirth.

Considered enormously innovative for its lack of props and scenery and revered for its sentimental but at bottom realistic depictions of middle-class America, Our Town soon became a staple of American theatre.