Wilder’s Ode to Mortality
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

It was on a certain May 7 just over a century ago that the sun rose for the first time on Grover’s Corners, N.H., but the long day of “Our Town” hasn’t ended yet. Thornton Wilder’s masterpiece seems to stand untouched in the freshness of that early light. In “The Alcestiad,” his later adaptation of Euripides, Wilder has the Watchman say, “The facts are the same — the facts of a human life are the same — but the sunlight gives them a meaning.” For all the apparent sunniness of his work, those meanings are dark. Wilder is probably the most genial of great American playwrights but he was also — in the phrase T.S. Eliot applied to the Elizabethan dramatist John Webster — “much possessed by death.” Throughout “Our Town,” the folksy bustle of Grover’s Corners — the humdrum chores, the curbside gossip and bantering, the friendships and the courtships, the successive milestones of family life — are backlit by a colder glow. “Our Town” may be the saddest play in the American repertoire.
Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) had the unique distinction of being equally gifted as a playwright and a novelist. “Heaven’s My Destination,” published in 1935, has always seemed to me one of the enduring works of fiction of the last century, and this was but one of a string of original and memorable novels, culminating in “Theophilus North” in 1973, two years before his death. Now, with “Collected Plays and Writings on Theater” (Library of America, 871 pages, $40), edited by J.D. McClatchy, it’s possible to appreciate Wilder’s versatile genius as a dramatist. This beautifully produced volume contains all his plays, published and unpublished in his lifetime, alongside several essays on theater, his own and that of others (Sophocles, Johann Nestroy, Shaw) — his various comments on “Our Town” are especially illuminating. As with all Library of America editions, there are succinct but useful notes and a detailed chronology, itself a lively biography of Wilder in miniature. In his preface to “Our Town,” Wilder remarked that “it is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.” This is a fine sentiment but one with intolerable consequences. Could we really live in the awareness of that value, moment by moment, without being overwhelmed? The poignancy of the play arises from the realization that only in retrospect, only in the light of finality, can we appreciate the preciousness of the passing moment, but its greatness lies in Wilder’s refusal of all solace for that slippery awareness. To read “Our Town” in the context of his other plays, as this new edition makes possible, is to see how obsessed with transience Wilder was.
In Wilder’s theater, miscommunication rules. In “The Matchmaker,” that hilarious farce which became “Hello, Dolly!” on Broadway in 1964 (and which finally made Wilder financially independent), Mrs. Molloy laments, “Oh dear, no one in the world understands anyone else in the world.” And in the same play, the wily Malachi, the flunkey to whom Wilder gives the best lines, remarks, “There’s nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.” In the third act of “Our Town,” the dead in their hillside cemetery eavesdrop on the living; the world outside their heads has become one with the world inside. They witness not only the misfired signals of the living, but the intense fragility of every moment of their lives, a fragility the living routinely ignore. When Emily begs for the chance to return for one day of her past life, and chooses the day of her 12th birthday, the scene is harrowing: She is at once the child she was and the woman she became, with all the bitter knowledge that has brought.
In his plays, from the experimental “The Skin of Our Teeth,” a farcical epic of human evolution, to the classical “Alcestiad,” Wilder took stock of human foolishness, but did so with immense forebearance. As Dolly herself puts it, “There comes a moment in everybody’s life when he must decide whether he’ll live among human beings or not — a fool among fools or a fool alone.” To dramatize this folly Wilder drew on various distancing devices; for him death was fundamentally an effect of distance. From the perspective of the dead, Grover’s Corners is at one and the same time a speck in the cosmos and an infinitely significant spot. Throughout the play he refers to the geological strata on which the town lies and its remoteness from the starlight falling on its inhabitants to reinforce this vastness of perspective. Like the Thebes or Yonkers or Excelsior, N.Y., of his other plays, Grover’s Corners is local and unmistakable, the quintessential American small town. But as the play’s universal popularity attests — it has been staged in dozens of languages around the world since its premiere in 1938 — “Our Town” is everyone’s town. It’s the town of the passing and unrepeatable moment. Fools alone or fools together, we all live there.