Life is peaceful in Grover’s Corners, NH. Its citizens do not make drama or confusion. But “Our Town”, by Thornton Wilder, located among the mountains there, is not a folk homage to simplicity. It is a boldly experimental piece about the beauty of everyday life and the tragic propensity of human beings to look beyond that.
When this understanding arrives, late and suddenly, it comes through a character we may have underestimated: Emily Webb, the smart daughter of the editor of the city newspaper. She swears she’ll make speeches her whole life, then falls in love with George Gibbs, the neighbor next door. If the stage narrator is the main role of the play, Emily is her beating heart – and a rare complex canonical role for young actresses who are just starting out.
After “Our Town” made its debut on January 22, 1938, at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, NJ, he quickly moved to Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize for drama that year. In the following decades, he gained a reputation for addictive sentimentality, a misperception that Howard Sherman’s new oral history, “Another day began: Thornton Wilder ‘Our city’ in the 21st century” (published on January 28 in the Methuen Drama), unmasks through the discussion of a dozen productions.
The New York Times recently spoke to eight actors who played Emily: on Broadway and Off in London and regional productions – two of them bi or multilingual. Lois Smith, now 90, made “Our Town” just 12 years after its debut, on a university stage. His thoughts on the role suggest how spacious Grover’s Corners can be. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.
(A word of warning, though: there is no way to talk seriously about “Our city” without mentioning its third radical act. Spoilers ahead.)
Helen Hunt
Broadway, 1989
I was replacing someone who was already in it, so it made me very nervous. I was working with Eric Stoltz, who was an old friend of mine, and Spalding Gray, for whom I had a great creative crush. I was so scared that my knees were shaking under my wedding dress in the second act, for sure.
I came back years later and saw the production of David Cromer and finally played the role of stage manager on it. At that time, I had already lived; I had lost things. That kind of devastating quality from the third act hit the target in a way that could never have happened when I played Emily.
The best Emily I’ve ever seen was in the production of David Cromer. She was a little older, and I think having that life experience and being a wonderful actor has made this role come to life more than before. Her name is Jennifer Grace.
Jennifer Grace
The Hypocrites, Chicago; Off Broadway; and the Broad Stage, Santa Monica, CA, 2008-2012
I was engaged when we started the show. Three months after I got married, I got the call to go to New York. My new husband stayed in Chicago. So it was this strange thing of leaving for New York, a newlywed, alone, doing this piece about this girl who is not leaving. The kind of desire I was having was almost the opposite of her desire. But I was accessing those fears and that feeling of loneliness and longing in Emily’s service.
As I am now in my life as a mother and as a widow, I am very grateful to have spent those years with that play and with Emily. I did not know at the time that I was preparing for my own experience with death and parting. A few years after I stopped – my son was a baby, almost the same age as George and Emily’s son – my husband died. And I had this feeling: All that time preparing myself as Emily, only to discover that I am George.
Thallis Santesteban
Miami New Drama, 2017
They asked me to send an audition video while I was on this trip. I actually filmed in a motel room in the middle of nowhere, Montana. I grew up in Mexico and had never heard of that play. Then my friend summed it up to me: “I think you are a child, and then you are a teenager, and then you are dead”. I read it as soon as I was cast. I vividly remember reading and crying in my bed.
I had rarely worked in such a bilingual room, where not only in the speech, but with the director I could come and go. It was much bigger than I imagined – how much that part would affect me because of the comings and goings from Spanish to English that I do in my daily life.
Lois Smith
Washington University, circa 1950
The play is written with everything in mimicry – props, etc. – and that’s how we produce it. It was in the round. There were four small ramps through the audience to the central stage, and one night, my first entry, I ran down the ramp and had the handle that wrapped my school books. And I slipped and fell – by accident. I sprawled on the floor.
What was exciting was that I knew exactly where the books were. The handle had come out of my hand and the books fell with me, and it was so exciting because of course we were doing the kind of sensory work that people do, studying the memory of the senses. It wasn’t long after the Russians arrived in New York and changed the face of American theater, you know. I still remember that to this day as a small triumph. Because the sensory memory was perfect: I was with the books when I fell; I knew where the books were going. It was not a pretense. I had them.
Sandra Mae Frank
Deaf West Theater and Pasadena Playhouse, 2017
The first thing that comes to mind is always this phrase: ‘Has any human being ever perceived life while living it? – every minute? ‘One of my hobbies is creating art using a quote from each role that remains with me, and that line was one of them.
As deaf, we value communication above all. In Act III, when Emily speaks to the spirits, all spirits, listeners and deaf, look directly at the audience. None of them made eye contact with me like Emily, and that added more layers because we deaf people need eye contact when talking to each other.
Yumi Iwama
National Asian American Theater Company, New York, 1994
The idea that I was an Asian actress playing this iconic American role was just scary. I remember being in a high emotional state during the race, because I really wanted to do it well. And I loved Emily.
Didn’t she have the “Do I belong here?” She was part of this city, part of this community. She simply lives her life with abandon in a way that I never thought she would have a license to do. I grew up in a very white city, Rumson, NJ, and was one of two or three Asians in my entire school. Was hard. My career started doing “The King and I.” I played Tuptim in seven different productions over the years. Emily was that first opening for me, that “Oh! Perhaps there is more to my career than these stereotyped Asian characters. “
Mahira Kakkar
Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2008
To me, Emily looks like the girl next door. I find this very attractive and I feel it exists in all cultures, all over the world. This is the part that resonates with me.
There are definitely things there that seem a lot like New England – the fact that many emotions are closed. I come from a culture where, at least with my family, everything is declared. People are very dramatic and use their hands to talk, laugh and cry. It’s almost Chekhovian. The director, Chay Yew, has always kept me from this. He said, “I don’t know if that will work for you in this play.”
Francesca Henry
Regent’s Park Open Air Theater, London, 2019
The pandemic made me think a lot about this piece and Emily. There is that part when she dies the first time. She is looking at the funeral party and says, “They are all closed in their boxes and cannot see.” I live in London and have been locked in my box for a while. Just this flood of bad news and this specter of death and illness that has been part of our lives for almost a year, and even despite all this opportunity to be enlightened about what is important, we are still kind of just closing our boxes, literally and intellectually, emotionally, politically. And we are really blind to what is important.
When I first read the play, I thought it was a pity that Emily didn’t make speeches her whole life. But there is validity in a small life. Just live and see people and value living.