1150 Wilder, Thornton
StaGeS oF LIFe in Our Town
In his 1938 Pulitzer Prize–winning play Our Town,
Thornton Wilder illustrates the “stages of life”
theme through the overarching structure of the
three-act play and through specific character-related
events.
The overall structure of Our Town is three acts
divided into the colloquial categories of “Daily
Life,” “Love and Marriage,” and an unnamed third
act; however, Wilder could have easily divided the
acts into “birth,” “adulthood,” and “death.” The
play’s three-act structure mirrors the stages of life.
Symbolically, the time of act 1 is “just before dawn,”
signifying the beginning of both a new day and of
life; act 2 symbolizes adulthood, as time flashes back
to the main characters just getting out of school in
early afternoon, then progresses forward to an early-
evening wedding. Act 3 progresses from dusk to a
cloud-covered, rainy night in the town’s cemetery;
thus, the setting of time and place signify the end
of life.
The characters and their actions reveal another
dimension of Wilder’s stages-of-life theme in act
- In the opening speech to the audience, the Stage
Manager tells the audience the name of the town,
Grover’s Corners and its exact location via longitude
and latitude; he then concludes his introduction
with the following sentence: “The day is May 7, - The time is just before dawn.” The time of
day, as noted earlier, is symbolic of new beginnings,
but it also represents the time of year as spring. May
in the northeastern United States is a time signified
by new growth and the much-anticipated arrival of
warmer weather. Wilder’s “birth” image is of the day
and the season in Our Town. After a general audi-
ence acclimation as to the town’s layout on the stage,
Wilder provides more stages-of-life symbols.
Stage Manager: Well, as I said, it’s just before
dawn.
The only lights on in town are in a
cottage over by the tracks where a Polish
mother’s just had twins.The proximity of the previous lines reinforces Wild-
er’s theme; he places the images of dawn and birth
together for further emphasis. As act 1 progresses,
he reminds the audience of this timeless theme in
the last long speech of the act:Stage Manager: . . . So—people a thousand
years from now—this is the way we were
in the provinces north of New York at the
beginning of the 20th century.—This is the
way we were: in our growing up and in our
marrying and in our living and in our dying.In act 1, Wilder directly and indirectly reveals the
stages of life in its simplest form. The beginnings
of a new day, a new season, and birth reiterate the
details of life often overlooked, even as far back as
1938.
At the beginning of act 2, Wilder again uses the
time of year to symbolize the next stage of life as
he continues this theme throughout the play. The
Stage Manager explains: “It’s three years later. It’s- It’s July 7th, just after High School Com-
mencement.” The early part of July is the middle of
the calendar year and, therefore, symbolic of early
adulthood or the middle years of one’s life. In the
early 20th century, life expectancy was not as long
for a person as compared to the early 21st century.
The soda-shop scene and the subsequent wedding
of act 2 highlight Wilder’s ability to dramatize this
stage of life’s right of passage: love and marriage.
By focusing on the universal feelings of awkward-
ness, fear, and excitement, Wilder shares with his
audience that although time changes many aspects
of life, the human emotions created by love change
little.
While the Stage Manager refuses to name act
3, saying only, “The First Act was called Daily Life.
This act [2] is called Love and Marriage. There’s
another act coming after this: I reckon you can
guess what that’s about,” the dreary rain and the
cemetery setting leave little doubt: This is the final
stage of life. In this final act of Our Town, Wilder
intertwines the theme of stages of life with his larger
themes of memory and responsibility. The play-
wright states clearly in act 3 that there is significance
in the details of life; those seemingly insignificant
moments in life that are only recognized through
memory. Most of the characters in act 3 wear the
traditional dark clothing of funerals, accompanied