Play Reading in English – Our Town by Thornton Wilder

'Our Town is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.' Thornton Wilder, Preface to Our Town and Other Plays.

Our Town is Thornton Wilder's most famous play and a modern American classic. An American dramatist and academic active in the first half of the 20th century, Wilder reached out to a universal audience in his novels and plays and tried to transcend the limitations of the realistic stage design and aesthetics of his time; nowhere is this more evident than in his 1938 play,  Our Town. The work was a huge success in its time coming toward the end of the crippling Great Depression era in the United States, and portrayed the everyday lives and the values and aspirations of ordinary people in a small rural town. For this reason the play has remained a very popular work in the dramatic repertoire, especially among amateur companies. It has been performed in Cantonese translation in Hong Kong a number of times, and has been adapted for film and television several times in the US.

The three-act play represents the everyday activities of life in a small New Hampshire town called Grover's Corners. Although the town is fictionalised it was based on a real New Hampshire town, as Wilder knew it, at the turn of the 20th century. The first act, set in 1901, introduces us to a number of typical working people in the town and their offspring, particularly the Webb family and the Gibbs family, who are representative of the town's average, down-to-earth, decent folk. The second act is set three years later, and concerns principally the wedding of the Webb family's daughter, Emily, and the Gibbs family's son, George. The final act jumps forward in time to 1913, and shows us how the town has changed and yet remained the same; there are a number of surprises for the audience, including a vision of life after death.

The whole play is devised to epitomise Wilder's philosophy about everyday life - the individual moments of which, however ordinary, are to be cherished, not taken for granted - and also the theatre. To quote the playwright: 'our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind - not in things, not in 'scenery'. The climax of this play needs only five square feet of boarding and the passion to know what life means to us.' Thus Wilder employs a Stage Manager as a transcendent narrator figure, uses minimal stage props and asks the actors to mime stage props, and the audience to use their imagination to conjure up the milkman's horse, Bessie, and so forth. In this great play Wilder brilliantly undermined  the contemporary pre-war obsession with realistic stage representation, because for him it 'militated against belief'; instead, he invokes the examples of the Chinese actor who conveys to us he is on horseback with a mere whip and the Japanese actor who invites us us to join him on his long journey as he makes a simple tour of the stage. These characteristics of the play enable us to make an interesting connection with last month's play-reading of S.I. Hsiung's 1934 English-language Chinese drama, Lady Precious Stream, which similarly broke the fourth wall and used non-illusionistic staging conventions.

Play reading will be conducted in English.

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