A Minister Goes to the Theater | Our Towns, Our Churches

Editor’s Note: “A Minister Goes to the Theater” is Brett Younger’s recurring column for Good Faith Magazine, which is a complementary gift for Good Faith Advocates. More information on becoming an advocate can be found here. The following first appeared in the January-March issue of Good Faith Magazine.

Since Our Town opened in 1938, preachers have been quoting Emily:

“It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Wait! One more look. Good-bye, Good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover’s Corners. Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it — every, every minute?”

The Stage Manager replies:

“No. The saints and poets, maybe they do some.”

When I repeat these lines, I try to sound like Paul Newman, my favorite version of Thornton Wilder’s Stage Manager.

Our Town, which Edward Albee called “the greatest American play ever written,” explores life in the fictional, now mythical, New Hampshire town of Grover’s Corners from 1901 to 1913. By one estimate, more than 40 productions are running over the next three months in high schools and colleges in the United States.

My wife Carol and I recently went to Broadway’s sixth and latest Our Town. The play’s three acts focus on daily life, love, and death. A childhood friendship turns into marriage and sets the stage for a meditation on what it means to be alive.

The current production advertises itself as “An Our Town for Our Time.” They update a timeless classic with a diverse cast — it is an interracial marriage now — and a cynical stage manager. Jim Parsons talks a lot faster than Paul Newman. Our Town can run two hours and thirty minutes, but this version is a brisk one hour and forty-five minutes. This Our Town opens with a chorus singing “Braided Prayer,” which features Muslim and Jewish, as well as Christian prayers — even though the Stage Manager says, “We’re eighty-five percent Protestants; twelve percent Catholic; rest indifferent.” Most of the people in town now know American Sign Language. Howie the milkman is portrayed by the deaf actor John McGinty.

The producers push Our Town’s adaptability to different cultures, while downplaying its more important universality, the way it speaks beyond culture. Wilder said his play presents “the life of a village against the life of the stars.” The big question for Our Town is the big question, “Is the universe a friendly place?”

The newspaper’s editor, Mr. Webb (Richard Thomas), thinks it is: “We’ve got a lot of pleasures of a kind here: we like the sun comin’ up over the mountain in the morning, and we all notice a good deal about the birds.”

Simon Stimson (Donald Webber, Jr.) expresses the opposing view: “To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know — that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.”

During the third act, I tried to figure out why I was crying. Was it my own ignorance and blindness? Was it nostalgia for a simpler time? Was it a longing for community? Was it the loss of people I love? Was it my sense of mortality?

The Stage Manager explains: “We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and ain’t even the stars. Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five-thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it.”

The Stage Manager admits, “Wherever you come near the human race there’s layers and layers of nonsense.” This is true for our towns and our churches, but every Sunday morning we keep gathering to try to realize life while we live it.