Our little town

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Scene with Elly Burgmer as Mrs. Gibbs and Ruth Schilling as Emily, Deutsches Theater Berlin 1945
Ruth Schilling as Emily (left), Elly Burgmer as Mrs. Gibbs (center) and Max Eckard as George

Our Little Town is an epic play by Thornton Wilder in three acts. On January 22, 1938, it was premiered in the United States under the original title Our Town ; the German premiere in Germany could not take place until after the end of the war in August 1945. At the Schauspielhaus Zürich , however, the first German-language performance took place on March 9, 1939, directed by Oskar Wältin . The piece was awarded the Pulitzer Prize after its premiere and was made into a film in 1940 .

content

Structure and plot

Grover's Corners is a fictional small town in New Hampshire at the turn of the century; their geographical coordinates are 42 ° 40 '0 "  N , 70 ° 37' 0"  W indicated. The place is presented as an ideal world. Everyone knows everyone, the children are well brought up, every morning the milkman comes up the street with his donkey. The biggest scandal is the church organist who is constantly drunk.

Each of the three acts takes place at a different time, and with each act the viewer sees subtle, sometimes tongue-in-cheek changes in small-town life. The city grows with each birth, the automobile slowly makes its appearance, the electric incubator is invented.

The first act (1901) has the motto "Daily Life". There are signs of a romance between the neighboring teenagers George Gibbs and Emily Webb. In addition, a variety of other characters are introduced, such as the parents and siblings of the two friends, public figures such as pastor and police officer. It is difficult to give an exact synopsis because the plot in the first act consists almost entirely of trivialities such as daily breakfast, household chores or schoolwork, in fact "daily life".

In the second act three years have passed and Emily and George are about to get married. A flashback shows how the couple found each other on their way home in an ice bar. The big wedding scene concludes. The motto of this act is "Love and Marriage".

The last act takes place in a cemetery in Grover's Corners in 1913. Emily died giving birth to her second child and ends up in the realm of the dead. She is given the opportunity to look down on the living from the hereafter and desperately wants to return to life. In fact, as her also dead mother-in-law Mrs. Gibbs explains, she can go back to any day in her life and experience it again, now from a distance. Emily does this and travels back for her 12th birthday. But here she realizes for the first time how vain are the things with which the living concern themselves. In one of the last scenes Emily tries downright to tear her mother out of her daily routine, to shake her up. However, this remains ineffective. Resigned, Emily returns to the realm of the dead and comes to terms with her death.

Relation to the epic theater

Our little town is an epic play and therefore contains some of the Brechtian features of this type of theater. There is no curtain in the play, the audience witnesses the stage being rearranged. The props and aids are also minimal. The milkman Howie Newsome's donkey is only indicated by gestures, the realm of the dead is represented by a collection of chairs. The alienation effect in the form of a journey into the hereafter is also typical.

interpretation

As with any epic play , in Our Little Town there is a learning effect over entertainment. In the banality of small town life, the whole of life should be reflected, the romance of Emily and George weighs just as heavy and is just as futile as any upper middle class wedding. The stories are repeated within the play: Emily's mother remembers her own marriage at her wedding, saying that “the world is set up completely wrongly” - without, however, throwing in a word of contradiction.

The meaning of life is addressed, sometimes openly by the game master, sometimes reflective in the monologues of individual characters, or simply shown through the mere plot. In the first act, the game master reports on the cornerstone of the newly built bank and what is to be put in it. Here, too, it becomes clear that life is extremely banal, "but wonderful" (quote from Mrs. Soames).

The play has no fable in the traditional sense; its content is daily life: love and marriage, death and graveyard, hence simply life to which death and the dead also belong. Wilder consistently avoids dramatic conflicts in the common sense; only in the third act, which is probably the most important for understanding his dramatic works, does the "drama" arise. The astonishing turn of life into death, which meanwhile exclusively means life, does not represent a dramatic problem for Wilder, unlike for Ioneso or Camus. With the look back of the dead on life, which already begins at their burial, life is preserved a completely different perspective. Emily is saddened because people remain blind to life and do not understand it because it moves so quickly that there is no time to look at it. This tension between life and the incomprehension or blindness with which it is lived does not dissolve in the piece. It is therefore no coincidence that shortly before the end of the game the motif of human blindness comes up again shrilly when the alcoholic organist who took his own life interferes in Emily's complaint and speaks of the cloud of ignorance in which the People are enveloped throughout their lives.

characters

Compared to other plays, Our Little City has a multitude of different characters.

The game master is the superordinate authority of the piece. He stands outside the plot, knows the process and the outcome and often addresses the audience directly. He leads through the process, which is sometimes confusing because of the numerous flashbacks and alienation effects, introduces characters, comments on scenes, occasionally anticipates future events and sometimes slips into individual (secondary) roles, such as that of the drugstore seller Mr. Morgan.

Dr. Frank Gibbs is the doctor at Grover's Corners and the father of George and Rebekka Gibbs. He is highly valued in the city, not only as a medic and a family man, but also as a historical figure. In the family he is strict but fair. The relationship with his wife is ambivalent, on the one hand the roles seem to be clear and unequally patriarchal, on the other hand it becomes clear in many scenes that Dr. Gibbs loves his wife more than anything.

Mrs. Julia Gibbs is the wife of Dr. Gibbs and the mother of George and Rebekka Gibbs. She is portrayed as a rather simple-minded woman who has been looking after the Gibbs household for decades without complaining. Her greatest wish is to see Paris one day. However, this does not come true. Mrs. Gibbs dies of pneumonia (which is only reported by the timeless omniscient game master) when she visits her now married daughter Rebekah. Mrs. Gibbs is a major part of the play. You can see them in the characteristic scenes at the breakfast tables at the beginning of the first two acts. Before the wedding, she persuades her son George, who threatens to back down. Finally, in the third act, she acts alongside the game master as an orientation for the "new" Emily in the afterlife and warns her of what to expect when she returns to the realm of the living.

George Gibbs is a classmate and later husband of Emily Webb. He's a good baseball player, which in Emily's eyes makes him a little cocky. His dream is to take over his uncle's farm one day, which he succeeds after the wedding with Emily.

Rebekka Gibbs is George's sister. She takes on a supporting role in the play, so the viewer learns little about her. Compared to George, she is humble, thrifty and naive. This is particularly evident in a conversation with her brother in which she tells him that she is imagining "that the moon comes closer and closer and then there is a huge explosion". According to the game master, she marries an insurance officer in Ohio after school and moves in with him.

Mr. Webb is the editor of a local newspaper called The Sentinel and the father of Emily and Willy Webb. In the first act he gives an insight into the political and social situation in Grover's Corners. Like Mrs. Gibbs and George, he encourages Emily on her wedding day, who suddenly panics. But he also speaks to George and advises him about his marriage never to take advice from others.

Like her neighbor Mrs. Gibbs, Mrs. Webb is characterized by a conservative understanding of roles and lives entirely for her household. (Quote: "As far as I'm concerned, I would rather have healthy children than smart ones.")

Emily Webb is one of, if not the main character, of the play as her life path is outlined throughout. In the third act at the latest, the action will focus on them. Emily, an archetypal All-American girl , is a very intelligent girl who is successful in school and popular with classmates and teachers. Emily has a particularly close relationship with her father, and she is quite distant from her rather simple-minded mother.

Willy Webb (originally Wally Webb ) is Emily's brother and only appears in a breakfast scene in the first act. After that he no longer plays a role in the play, although in the third act you learn from Emily that he died of appendicitis.

Joe Crowell Jr. is the newsboy in act one.

Howie Newsome is Grover's Corners' milkman. In a sense, it heralds every act, as he walks across the stage with his imaginary donkey Bessie at the beginning of each act.

In the first act, Professor Willard gives the audience a lecture on the geographical features of Grover's Corners. This scene is more for amusement and relaxation, especially since the small town is anything but special.

Simon Stimson is the church organist and choirmaster for Grover's Corners. Most of the city's wives sing with him. An open secret and scandal is his alcoholism, which is always blasphemed after the choir rehearsal. The piece lives in particular from the vocal scenes that result from it.

Mrs. Soames is portrayed as a somewhat exaggerated and dazzling personality, naive and loud, but always with enthusiasm. During the wedding scene in particular, she noticed by constant interruptions how much she “enchants” this wedding.

Other characters include the cop Warren, Si Crowell, Joe Stoddard, Sam Craig and Mr. Carter . In addition, players who sit in the audience have their own mini-appearances. In the third act, various extras complete the picture of the afterlife as “dead people”.

Quotes

  • The gamemaster: “ A poet from the Midwest said: You have to love life to live it and you have to live life to love it. "
  • Mrs. Soames: “ I always say luck, that's what matters. The most important thing in life is to be happy. "
  • Emily: “ Don't you, they [the living] don't understand? "- Mrs. Gibbs:" No, dear, not very much. "
  • Emily: " Are there people who fathom life while they are living it? Can they ever? " GM : " No. - Maybe the saints and the poets - a little ." (Motto in: Walter Nigg: Saints and Poets , Zurich 1991)

Trivia

  • Kurt Vonnegut mentions Our Little City several times with words of praise in his - in the broadest sense - thematically similar work Timequake (Eng. Time quake ).

Film adaptations

Radio plays

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Heinz Beckmann: Thornton Wilder. Friedrich Verlag, Velber near Hanover 1966, 2nd edition 1971 ( Friedrichs Dramatiker des Welttheater , Volume 16), p. 65 f. See also Alfred Weber: Our Town · Thornton Wilder . In: W. Hüllen, W. Rossi, W. Christopeit (ed.): Contemporary American Poetry - An Introduction to American Literature Review with Texts and Interpretations . Hirschgraben Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 3rd edition 1969, pp. 180-185, here in particular pp. 181 f. and 184