This is a tale of three cities: Springfield, Ohio; Aurora, Colorado; and Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire.
The first two are, of course, real cities. They’ve become the locus of disinformation spun by former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, in their efforts to demonize undocumented immigrants.
Credit: Jeremy Freeman / Dagger Agency
Credit: Jeremy Freeman / Dagger Agency
But Grover’s Corners was born in the imagination of Thornton Wilder. It’s the small New Hampshire village where he set his Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Our Town.”
Since its premiere in 1938, “Our Town” has become the most frequently produced play in the United States. It is widely considered one of the most important plays in the American canon.
My wife and I recently saw a new Broadway production of “Our Town” directed by Atlanta-based, Tony Award-winning director Kenny Leon.
“Our Town” has been close to Leon’s heart for years. In 2010, he staged an acclaimed production of the Wilder classic at True Colors, the Atlanta theater he founded after leaving his post as the longtime artistic director of the Alliance Theatre.
Leon said in the program’s playbill that he began imagining how he would stage a new Broadway production as he sat on the back porch of his Atlanta home in 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown. At a time when the sting of living in isolation and the fear of a deadly disease were a daily presence, Leon realized that “Our Town” “leans in with love and hope for a more precious future as we learn lessons from the past.”
He had no idea at that time that his production would arrive on Broadway during the final stages of this year’s presidential campaign. But just weeks before Election Day, this is a bittersweet but entirely necessary moment for a new “Our Town.”
The 2024 race has exacerbated the deep divisions and hostilities among Americans. Our trust in institutions has continued to decline. And the values we’ve long placed on being good citizens and neighbors seem to have eroded as well.
There are no Haitian immigrants capturing and eating neighbor’s pets, no Venezuelan gangs running amok in Grover’s Corners. Rather, the play introduces us to the routine lives of the people of Wilder’s village. We watch them having babies (the birth of twins swells the population to 2,642 citizens), celebrating a marriage and mourning a death that arrives too soon. Importantly, Wilder shows us that those life cycle events are shared by the community as a whole.
There are political differences among the citizens of Grover’s Corners. The Stage Manager, who is the narrator of “Our Town,” tells us the town is “86% Republican, 6% Democrat, 4% Socialist, rest indifferent.” But apparently, unlike today, they manage to keep their partisan differences in perspective. “Wherever you come near the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense,” the Stage Manager states flatly.
Watching Leon’s “Our Town,” I welcomed the portrayal of an America built on the things that bind us together, unlike the “nonsense” of a presidential race that has sharpened our differences, turning neighbor against neighbor.
That point is made achingly clear to us as the Stage Manager takes us to the Grover’s Corners cemetery, where he points to the graves of the Civil War dead:
“New Hampshire boys. Had a notion the Union ought to be kept together though they’d never seen more than 50 miles of it themselves. All they knew was the name, friends, the United States of America. The United States of America. And they went and died about it.”
In the final, heart-wrenching scene of “Our Town,” Emily, who has died in childbirth, is given the chance to say farewell to all she knew as she makes a desultory tour of Grover’s Corners before settling in her grave:
“I can’t bear it…. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize all that was going on in life, and we never noticed…. 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’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”
“Human beings,” she concludes, “are just blind people.”
Like many other journalists — and the Harris and Trump campaign themselves — I’ve called the 2024 race perhaps the most important election in our history. And it’s true that the stakes are exceedingly high. But what comes afterward?
I left “Our Town” wondering who we will be when the election is over. If Trump wins, and if his first term is any indication, there likely will be a degree of chaos. Do we want to live in his fictional version of Springfield, Ohio, where pets are being turned into dinner for Haitians? If it’s Harris, how will the country respond to seeing the first woman — a woman of color — sitting behind the Resolute Desk?
In “Our Town,” I think Wilder makes the choice clear: We can prove Emily’s judgment that human beings are blind and continue living in separate hostile camps. Or we can realize that the things we share in common are so much more important than our partisan differences: babies being born, couples marrying, and everyone eventually heading to the grave.
Certainly, the outcome of the election is crucial. But perhaps even more important is how we choose to move on when it’s over.
About the Author
