The Story Behind Our Town: Building the First Grover's Corners

"Act I: No curtain. No scenery. The audience, arriving, sees an empty stage in half-light."

Audiences accustomed to the realism of Clifford Odetts or the spectacle of the Ziegfeld Follies were baffled by the blank canvas Thornton Wilder made of Our Town, a play about life, death and everything in between in the anywhereville of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. The play opened on Broadway in February 1938—a moment sandwiched between the Great Depression and World War II. But, conveniently set between 1901 and 1913, Wilder surgically removed the politics of the day and drew his viewers’ attention to evergreen questions about what gives a life—especially a simple one—purpose that transcends time. Emily Webb and George Gibbs, a pair we see walk in tandem through every stage of life, are the playwright's unassuming vessels.

“I tried to restore significance to the small details of life by removing scenery,” Wilder wrote in his “Preface for ‘Our Town,’” published in The New York Times nine days after its Broadway opening. “The spectator through lending his imagination to the action restages it inside his own head.” It didn’t take long for these restagings to start pouring out of spectators’ heads, with a deluge of films, radio plays, operas and TV shows molded from Wilder’s text. You can even see Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint lead a 1955 musical version that was broadcast on NBC’s Producers’ Showcase—though Newman preferred not to be reminded of his time as a crooning George Gibbs while he was playing the Stage Manager on Broadway in 2002.

Director Kenny Leon has brought Our Town back to Broadway, with a cast of 28 filling out the picture of everyday America—Jim Parsons (Stage Manager), Ephraim Sykes (George Gibbs), Zoey Deutch (Emily Webb) and Katie Holmes (Mrs. Webb) among them. Whether this version is your first or tenth trip to Grover’s Corners, learn about how this timeless classic came to be.

A PETERBOROUGHVIAN FOR GOOD
Thornton Wilder launched his literary career in 1926 with his first novel, The Cabala—a semi-autobiographical story about an American student living in post-World War I Rome. The following year, he published The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a novel that won him a 1928 Pulitzer Prize and told the interweaving stories of individuals killed in an Inca rope bridge collapse in Peru. Wilder himself said the novel posed the question: “Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual's own will?” Our Town, with its sense of wonder in the mundane, could be read as an answer to that question. Speaking through the Stage Manager at the top of Act III, Wilder writes, “There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”

Wilder wrote a large portion of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire—the place that famously inspired his fictional hamlet of Grover’s Corners and where he wrote much of Our Town. He did his first of nine residencies in 1924 when he was 27 and still teaching French at the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. In 1928, he wrote a letter of gratitude to Marian MacDowell, who founded the artist colony with her husband, composer Edward MacDowell. “I am one of your loyalest and most indebted boys,” he wrote. “Long sections of The Bridge of San Luis Rey were written in the valley below Emil's garden. I would write a page and then go out and walk around in the sunlight until I had stopped crying.”

He closed the letter saying, “I am a Peterboroughvian for good, and when my teaching routine is at last over I want to be a real soldier for you in more practical fields. With all my admiration and affection, Thornton Wilder."

THE FLAMBOYANT MAN OF INTERMITTENT CHARM
The year before Our Town’s premiere, Wilder adapted Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House for its ninth Broadway iteration. The production starred Ruth Gordon as Nora, who would also lead the 1955 Broadway premiere of Wilder’s The Matchmaker, the play that inspired the iconic Jerry Herman musical Hello, Dolly! The production of A Doll’s House also teamed up Wilder with producer-director Jed Harris, to whom Wilder promised the reins of Our Town while he was still writing it. Harris had a run of early successes, including Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page, which he produced in 1928 with playwright George S. Kaufman providing staging. Kaufman, who grew to loathe the “flamboyant man of intermittent charm,” is quoted as saying, “When I die, I want to be cremated and have my ashes thrown in Jed Harris' face.” By the time Our Town landed on stage, Wilder shared the sentiment.

M MARRIES N
Our Town’s original title was M Marries N, a phrase that survives in the Stage Manager’s Act II soliloquy about the beautiful monotony of marriage. The title later became Our Village before Wilder finally landed on Our Town. The piece was partly inspired by a trip to Rome Wilder took in 1920 as a 23-year-old archaeology student at the American Academy. During a visit to a local dig, the present collided with the ancient past. As Penelope Niven quoted in her biography of Wilder, the playwright wrote home to his parents:

“... while by candle-light we peered at famous paintings of a family called Aurelius, symbolic representations of their dear children and parents ... the street-cars of today rushed by over us. We were clutching at the past to recover the loves and pieties and habits of the Aurelius family, while the same elements were passing above us.”

Years later, Wilder would write that Our Town was meant to set “the life of a village against the life of the stars”—the intimate becoming infinite.

He worked on the play at the MacDowell Colony during his 1937 residency and continued writing in Salzburg and Zurich where he had a front-row seat to the rising tide of fascism across Europe—a uniquely dark moment in the abiding cycle of human behavior. In the fall of 1937, he wrote to Gertrude Stein (a member of his artistic inner circle) saying that he had had “an influx of ideas that make my little play the most beautiful one you can imagine.”

By that December, Wilder was back stateside and the play was in rehearsals, with Frank Craven starring as the Stage Manager, his son John playing the young, upstanding George Gibbs, Evelyn Varden as Mrs. Gibbs and Martha Scott as Emily Webb (she was hired only eight days before the first performance after two other actresses were dismissed from the role). As promised, Jed Harris was at the helm. On January 12, 1938, Wilder wrote to Stein again: “As you predicted Jed got the notion that he had written the play and was still writing it. As long as his suggestions for alterations are on the structure they are often very good; but once they apply to the words they are always bad and sometimes atrocious. There have been some white-hot flaring fights.”

HE DID NOT MERELY DISLIKE IT...
Our Town premiered on January 22, 1938 in a one-night engagement at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey. By that time, (as Howard Sherman details in his book Another Day's Begun) Harris had requested co-author credit on the play, which Wilder resolutely denied. Harris wrote about Wilder’s reaction to the McCarter premiere in his memoir: “He did not merely dislike it, he detested it. And his detestation reached such shrill heights on the opening night in Princeton that all further communication between us lapsed.”

A letter Wilder wrote to his friend and attorney J. Dwight Dana, however, tells a different story: “The performance at Princeton was an undoubted success. The large theater was sold out with standees,” Wilder said. He added that the crowd was “swept by laughter often; astonishment; and lots of tears; long applause at the end by an audience that did not move from its seats.” 

When the play moved to Boston ahead of its Broadway premiere, Wilder continued to grumble about Harris’ input. He wrote to Stein on February 1, 1938, “The play no longer moves or even interests me; now all I want out of it is money.”

GROVER'S CORNERS ON BROADWAY
Harris immediately brought Our Town to Broadway, opening it on February 4 at the Henry Miller’s Theatre (now the Stephen Sondheim), even though another booking at the venue meant the play could only stay for 10 days. Harris quickly moved the production to the Morosco (now the Marriott Marquis) just two blocks north, where it reopened February 14, all while the enmity between him and his playwright persisted.

When Wilder requested corrections to the text in the Broadway production, Harris wrote him calling his latest communication “a characteristic blend of fatuousness, vanity and superb unconscious buffoonery.” When rumor spread that Harris hoped to step in as the Stage Manager during Frank Craven’s vacation, Wilder joined Actors Equity and performed the role himself. And in the most counterintuitive move of all, Wilder allowed Our Town to be published on April 2, 1938 with Harris’ unwelcome additions. The Dramatists Guild contract gives the author full control of the script, but to hold Harris to those terms would have meant speaking to him. Wilder didn’t publish a revised version of the play until 1957.

A HAUNTING LEGACY
Our Town ran at the Morosco Theatre for over 300 performances through November 19, and even with Harris and Wilder’s tug-of-war over the script, the play earned the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, meanwhile, bested it for the coveted Drama Critics Circle Award). The reception varied, with some critics left perplexed by the play's quiet minimalism. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt even chimed in with her opinion. On March 2, 1938, in her daily column, “My Day,” she wrote, “When I went to see Our Town, I was moved and depressed beyond words.” She continued, “It is more interesting and more original and I am glad I saw it, but I did not have a pleasant evening.”

New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson, however, captured the eventual consensus Our Town would garner in the hive mind of the American theater: “Under the leisurely monotone of this production is a fragment of the immortal truth. Our Town is a microcosm. It is also a hauntingly beautiful play.”