Our Town - Background

Background

The play is set in the fictional community of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, modeled upon several towns in the Mount Monadnock region: Peterborough, Jaffrey, Dublin and others. The narrator gives the coordinates of Grover's Corners as 42°40′ north latitude and 70°37′ west longitude, which is in Massachusetts, about a thousand feet off the coast of Rockport.

Our Town's narrator, the Stage Manager, is completely aware of his relationship with the audience, leaving him free to break the fourth wall and address them directly. According to the script, the play is to be performed with little scenery, no set and minimal props. Wilder was dissatisfied with the theatre of his time: "I felt that something had gone wrong....I began to feel that the theatre was not only inadequate, it was evasive." His answer was to have the characters mime the objects with which they interact. Their surroundings are created only with chairs, tables, and ladders. For example, the scene in which Emily helps George with his evening homework, conversing through upstairs windows, is performed with the two actors standing atop separate ladders to represent their neighboring houses. Says Wilder, "Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind – not in things, not in 'scenery.' "