various functions of the theater, in its brief evening-length range. And it too now seems a bit of a noble failure, though it did win the Pulitzer Prize for its year.
The ironic fact is that Wilder had already created his most formally ingenious and original work a few years earlier, in a play that appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with Joyce, or indeed with any other piece of writing I’ve ever encountered. Our Town , like Moby-Dick and all other truly innovative works of literature, seems to have no direct ancestor but itself. Often disguised as a somewhat sentimental piece of Americana (particularly when it is performed at the grade-school and middle-school level, as it so often is), Wilder’s play about Emily Webb, George Gibbs, and the other small-town inhabitants of Grover’s Corners is actually a quietly radical piece of theater. I might never have realized this, had I not seen the revelatory production that was directed by David Cromer at the Barrow Street Theater in 2010. Assembled with the other onlookers who were seated on bleachers surrounding and even among the performers, I understood for the first time that we too are the ghostly presences to whom and of whom Emily is speaking in her final, after-death soliloquy; we too belong with the temporarily living characters who will someday be numbered among the dead. And Cromer, by taking on the role of the Stage Manager (the role that, in both its novelty and its down-to-earth practicality, most clearly pinpoints Wilder’s revolutionary technique), actively helped me toward this realization. Delivering those perspective-shaping lines in his own flat, Midwestern, non-actorly voice, occasionally standing among and even touching the audience members as he spoke, David Cromer personally cemented the connection between the play’s reality and our reality, for we knew that as the director he really was the play’s stage manager.
A play is a form of literature that only completely exists onstage. That is merely its shadow, or its embryo, that we read in script form, and if one’s theatrical expertise is insufficient, as mine certainly is, a script alone may fail to yield up some of the work’s most important effects. It took Cromer’s fully embodied version of Our Town to remind me of something I’ve had to rediscover repeatedly: that deep feelings are by no means incompatible with artistic self-consciousness. Both the human heart and the theatrical fourth wall were pierced by that singular performance, and the familiar paradox lay in the fact that my awareness of being in a theater space with other silently weeping audience members contributed to, rather than shattered, the illusion. And what was the illusion, exactly? That these characters were alive? (But they told us themselves they were long dead.) That human lives could be viewed from a distance, as if historically or even geologically? (But the play itself was allowing us to see things in that way.) Or perhaps that these quotidian tragedies—hope disappointed, early death, longing, regret—had some kind of bearing on our own lives? If that is an illusion, I wonder what reality might be.
* * *
The kind of magic Thornton Wilder accomplished through his Stage Manager—that intermediary between the characters and ourselves, that broker of their experience to us—has long been performed in a less explicit way by nondramatic writers. In a novel or a poem, the stage manager is language, and the challenge for the author is to use it in the way Wilder used his: as a screen between us and the characters that somehow intensifies rather than diminishes our sense of felt connection with these fictional people. The language needs to point to itself as a tangible medium and at the same time afford us the transparency of a window onto another life. It must get in the way and get out of the way, all at once. I can think of many remarkable works that accomplish this, starting with Don Quixote if not
The ironic fact is that Wilder had already created his most formally ingenious and original work a few years earlier, in a play that appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with Joyce, or indeed with any other piece of writing I’ve ever encountered. Our Town , like Moby-Dick and all other truly innovative works of literature, seems to have no direct ancestor but itself. Often disguised as a somewhat sentimental piece of Americana (particularly when it is performed at the grade-school and middle-school level, as it so often is), Wilder’s play about Emily Webb, George Gibbs, and the other small-town inhabitants of Grover’s Corners is actually a quietly radical piece of theater. I might never have realized this, had I not seen the revelatory production that was directed by David Cromer at the Barrow Street Theater in 2010. Assembled with the other onlookers who were seated on bleachers surrounding and even among the performers, I understood for the first time that we too are the ghostly presences to whom and of whom Emily is speaking in her final, after-death soliloquy; we too belong with the temporarily living characters who will someday be numbered among the dead. And Cromer, by taking on the role of the Stage Manager (the role that, in both its novelty and its down-to-earth practicality, most clearly pinpoints Wilder’s revolutionary technique), actively helped me toward this realization. Delivering those perspective-shaping lines in his own flat, Midwestern, non-actorly voice, occasionally standing among and even touching the audience members as he spoke, David Cromer personally cemented the connection between the play’s reality and our reality, for we knew that as the director he really was the play’s stage manager.
A play is a form of literature that only completely exists onstage. That is merely its shadow, or its embryo, that we read in script form, and if one’s theatrical expertise is insufficient, as mine certainly is, a script alone may fail to yield up some of the work’s most important effects. It took Cromer’s fully embodied version of Our Town to remind me of something I’ve had to rediscover repeatedly: that deep feelings are by no means incompatible with artistic self-consciousness. Both the human heart and the theatrical fourth wall were pierced by that singular performance, and the familiar paradox lay in the fact that my awareness of being in a theater space with other silently weeping audience members contributed to, rather than shattered, the illusion. And what was the illusion, exactly? That these characters were alive? (But they told us themselves they were long dead.) That human lives could be viewed from a distance, as if historically or even geologically? (But the play itself was allowing us to see things in that way.) Or perhaps that these quotidian tragedies—hope disappointed, early death, longing, regret—had some kind of bearing on our own lives? If that is an illusion, I wonder what reality might be.
* * *
The kind of magic Thornton Wilder accomplished through his Stage Manager—that intermediary between the characters and ourselves, that broker of their experience to us—has long been performed in a less explicit way by nondramatic writers. In a novel or a poem, the stage manager is language, and the challenge for the author is to use it in the way Wilder used his: as a screen between us and the characters that somehow intensifies rather than diminishes our sense of felt connection with these fictional people. The language needs to point to itself as a tangible medium and at the same time afford us the transparency of a window onto another life. It must get in the way and get out of the way, all at once. I can think of many remarkable works that accomplish this, starting with Don Quixote if not
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