Revisiting “Our Town”

I suddenly decided to go read Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”. I was assigned that book in secondary school, when I was 14. It was not a great time for me, in a way, it was peak adolescent angst, and in some ways, one of the worst years of my life, and reading that book, as well as “Brave New World” were amongst the few highlights of my life. Another highlight was that I had a lot of fun loving classmates, although owing to the experiences I had after that, I’m starting to wonder if I overly romanticised that bunch of people. But the point is that it was a time of growth and change, and I’d have liked to go back and ask a few of them what was going on with them during that time, which is what I did not do back then when my head was up my ass.

But those days, I was living my life through a haze, and feeling that I hadn’t seen or felt a lot of things that other people were going through. My fear of missing out was also pretty heightened during those days. One of the songs I listened to during those days was “Winter in July” by Bomb the Bass.

Sometimes I feel that class reunions are opportunities to go back into the past and revisit events, and try to see them in a different light, and try to catch up on what we missed the first time around. Our perceptions of those events that affected us a lot while we were teens were formative ones, but what would our lives have been like if we had seen them differently? Of course, it’s difficult to go back and relive those days, because you’re seeing things from the perspective of almost a different person, who has formed a different view of things.

Anyway, that’s one of the takeaways from “Our Town”. There’s a lot going on in the lives of people, a lot going on in their heads, and when we were living through it, we never had a clue. We never even had a clue about what’s going on in our lives.

One of the great geniuses of the play is that it takes seemingly mundane events, and then elevate them into something greater, something universal. One of the central themes is emergence: you take unremarkable people, and then you transform their lives into something that is totally remarkable. It’s a premise that’s been used various times in a few of my favourite movies: “American Beauty”, “Yi Yi”, or any number of movies by Ozu. The events depicted are just a diorama, just some kind of a microcosm for something that’s even larger, some greater spirit, some life force.

It would be easy to take the nondescript quality of the characters as a lack of character development, but the real character here was the town, even as it is invisible, in the sense that the sets do not depict it. Individuals were less important here than their relationships with each other. These guys are almost Asian. The idea was not to present a strong portrayal of characters to the audience, but to subtly remind the audience of their own lives, to see themselves reflected in the ordinariness of the Webbs and the Gibbs.

In another sense, the true center of the play was the gaze of the audience, and in a more abstract way, you were looking at them from a god level perspective. Because these people were the microcosm of the rest of human existence, you get reminded over and over of their universality. They are families who have lived there for generations. Perhaps they were the last generation of people to have used horse drawn carriages. They have ancestors who were pilgrims. They gazed at stars who shone their light a few thousand years ago. They are specks when compared to the rest of the universe, but yet when they perish, their significance is so weighted that the newly demised Emily can only bear to live through one day of her life, before she finds it so unbearable that she has to go back to being dead.

What the play portrays are thin slices. Brief introductions of the townfolk, as a thin slice of the town. A few key moments of the main characters as a thin slice of their lives. The town as a thin slice of humanity. We see the town up close in Act 1, but by Act 3, we are talking about large generalities, we see the dead, as well as how they are remembered through to eternity.

I find it very striking that America, in many ways, has invented the modern city, in Chicago and New York. And yet it contends that its true soul lies in the small towns. Perhaps the US is the one place where the idea of the big city and small town has had time to co-exist with each other. Perhaps in the US and very few other places, you’d have townsfolk as literate as in the city. In most of the rest of the world, the image of the big city has become so glittering that you just want to get out of your miserable country side farm and move into a slum, and you might think that the slum is a better place. Sometimes I think that there is some value in Americana, because they embodied the idea of the livable small towns and the big city (think of those big cities in America circa 1900 – Cleveland, Chicago, New York, St Louis) which hadn’t started to resemble the sprawl that you see in the later big cities in the third world, and in the more newly developed places in Los Angeles and the sunbelt.

“Our Town” tacitly assumes that the audience can relate to the small town as the heart and soul of America, and it strikes me that this is a vision of America that’s disappearing. Small towns in America are not like that anymore. They are squeezed by brain drain, collapse of manufacturing and farming. They are hollowed out, and many of their best and brightest have chosen to move to the bigger cities, bigger tech clusters.

Yes, I can relate to the flush of new love, to the difficulties of family life, to going to school and seeing the doctor. This was a nice world, where people were part of a community, and who did not feel alienated from each other, who crossed paths with each other. But this was a life that we’d have called “suaku”. I read this play at the end of the 20^th century, and maybe I could still relate to it, but that was before the internet age. Our world has seemed to grow a lot bigger and a lot smaller at the same time. On one hand, you have access to all the books that you could ever have. When we were being taught “Our Town”, we didn’t even get access to the printed books. All we had were photocopies, and no doubt the education authorities did the paperwork to ensure that we got the right to distribute a few hundred copies, but it felt like I was reading samizdat. From the vantage point of Singapore, it felt like there was a big world out there, and we were living on a desert island, and we were being cut off from it. But during the 90s, a series of bookstores opened that largely increased our access to printed material from the English speaking world, and during the 00s, the Singapore public libraries were revamped to the extent that we got a great amount of reading material. But our world was much less interconnected back in the day.

So to be looking at “Our Town” is a very strange experience. We had a much smaller world back then, that was the pre-war time. It’s strange that the play was written during a simpler time (the 1930s, which was before the 60s) and set during a simpler time (beginning of the 20^th century, before everybody had cars), and in turn I was reading this play during a simpler time (before the internet). In essense, the play was a very brief sketch of the life of a town, during the first two acts. And the third act pans the setting all the way to eternity. The town is very large in the first two acts, and then it’s revealed to be no more than a speck when seen backwards through time.

But that was the life of a person who lived in the 20^th century. They were worried about school, going through their daily routines, and in a quaint way, the town was rather detached from everything else around them. It was an idyllic world, very organic, everybody had his place in it – even the most angsty guy, the town drunkard was somebody everybody knew, and he was not consigned to oblivion. Nobody was truly alienated from each other. They met each other, fell in love, married each other. And everybody felt like they belonged. There were ties to the outside: somebody was from a state university, somebody went to MIT, maybe somebody might have gone to fight a war, and the graveyard marked some kind of continuity with centuries of history where the families lived in the town for generations. It strikes me, especially since 2016, that these are communities which are torn asunder. These were communities that were dignified in a quiet way, but now they became backwaters which are removed from the action, where people are barely getting by, and they are getting passed by by the rest of the world.

Today’s world is one where the ties between people are weakened, where, in contrast to what John Donne thinks, every man is in some way an island. Or at least they are molecules in some vast primordial soup, joining and breaking up again. We will possibly never know a “town” like that anymore. We live now in cities, and if the city is some kind of a space where people of different backgrounds meet, and collide and rub up against each other, then the internet is the ultimate city, and the biggest one of them all. In “Our Town”, you won’t have Presidents sending out outrageous tweets, you won’t be living in the same metropolitan area, like, say “Los Angeles”, where you can sample cuisines from all over the world, or some convincing imitation thereof. It won’t be a place where high stakes sports are played out, where great inventions are being unveiled, where people of various nationalities are directly insulting each other over the internet, not quite face to face but somewhat face to face. The staggering complexity of human experience is different. Life is lived at a different tempo.

“Our Town” seems to be very different from all this. It seems to present a very simple vision of the essence of what your life is, and exhorts you to breathe in the richness from this simplicity. That’s certainly one way to look at it. Yet another way to look at it is that, in removing the sets from the big moments of your life, in telling you that the physical setting doesn’t actually matter, it’s telling you that much of what’s truly important is virtual. It might be that “Our Town” is one of the first and earliest advocates of virtual reality.

Yet I feel that the richness of the our town experience comes from this deep sense that people are connected with each other in a rich way, and that’s not necessarily what you’re going to get if your live your life online.