OUR TOWN
Before You Watch…
Our Town is probably unlike any other play you’ve
ever seen. You won’t find in it the fast-paced action of a TV
drama or the lavish setting of a Hollywood production. It’s
not a musical (although music plays a part), and it’s not a
comedy (though it’s laced with gentle humor). It is, however,
an enormously appealing play that won the Pulitzer Prize for
1938 and became a smash hit on Broadway.
The author
Our Town was written by Thornton Wilder. Born in
Madison, Wisconsin, in 1897, Wilder spent part of his youth
in the Far East, where his father was American consul general.
After returning to the U.S., Wilder attended high school in
Berkeley, California, then went on to Oberlin College, Yale,
and Princeton. He studied archaeology in Rome (you’ll see
his knowledge of the subject in Professor Willard’s speech),
and later taught at the University of Chicago and Harvard.
In 1928, Wilder enjoyed his first major success. His
novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey became a bestseller, won
the Pulitzer Prize for 1928, and was converted into a popular
movie. After 1928, Wilder wrote and adapted a number of
lesser-known works including scripts for several Hollywood
films. However, it was not until Our Town was produced in
1938 that he again experienced widespread public acclaim. In
1943, he went on to win his third Pulitzer Prize for the play
The Skin of Our Teeth. He died in 1975 at the age of 78.
The times
The theatre of the ‘20s and early 30’s was the theatre
of Realism. Playwrights of this era relied on elaborate
settings, props and costumes to make their plays as “realistic”
as possible. Their intent was to imitate life down to the last
detail on stage.
During the late ‘20s, Wilder became dissatisfied with
this approach. He believed that the more playwrights relied on
props and settings to simulate reality, the further from real
“truth” their plays became. Every prop, every piece of
scenery tied the play to one place, one time, one set of
fictional characters; and the more specific the play became,
the less it approached universal truth. According to Wilder,
good theatre concerns all people, in all places, at all times. In
writing Our Town, Wilder tried to put these beliefs into
practice.
You know that Our Town became enormously
popular in 1938, but how much do you know about that year?
What was happening socially and historically? What was the
mood of the country? Write your answer briefly on the back
of this sheet.
Things To Look For…
1. A character who can step in and out of the action of the
play.
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2. Characters who are not “part” of the play.
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3. A character who returns to the past.
__________________________________________________
4. A character who can see the future and past as well as the
present.
__________________________________________________
5. An invisible and imaginary character.
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6. A character who tells other characters when to end a scene.
__________________________________________________
Copyright 1977 c by The Bell System
Name:
Date:
Our Town
Background study guide
Find the answers wherever you can, including the “Before You Watch” article.
The Author
1. Name (Spell it carefully!):
7. Universities attended:
2. Dates of birth and death:
8. Universities where he taught:
3. Place of birth:
4. Father’s job:
5. Where did the playwright spend some of his childhood?
6. Pulitzer Prize (definition):

Titles of literary works that received the above prize & years of publication:
The Play
1. Date produced:
2. World events at that time:
3. What type of set design & props are used --in most plays?
-- in Our Town?
4. What do specific set designs and props distract the audience from?
Our Town Vocabulary Act I
Name:
Period:
1. proscenium – part of the stage in front of the curtain (bridge between most of the action and the audience)
2. William Jennings Bryan – American political leader and famous orator (public speaker—ties in with recurring mention
of speeches and public speakers throughout play. (Bryan had made a speech from the steps of the Town Hall in Grover’s Corners.)
3. trellis – frame of light strips of wood criss-crossing one another with open spaces in between; lattice, especially one
supporting growing vines. (The trellis in Our Town is an archway representing the back doors to the Gibbs and Webb houses.)
4. burdock, heliotrope – flowering plants with purple or pinkish leaves (Reference recurs in the description of the town and
in characters who take the time to pause and appreciate the lovely scent—literally stopping in their busy lives to smell the flowers.)
5. separator (related to dairy) – device that separates the milk from the cream in a dairy (separator’s breaking down
makes milkman late; used to symbolize Wilder’s intent to bridge the gap, “break down” whatever separates the
characters from the audience and us from the significant parts of our lives)
6. phosphate (strawberry) soda – carbonated water flavored with fruit syrup and containing a little phosphoric acid
(George’s mom accuses him of wasting his money on strawberry phosphates when he complains that 25 cents a week isn’t enough
for him to buy what he needs.)
7. highboy – tall chest of drawers on legs (Mrs. Gibbs has an antique highboy left to her by her grandmother—therefore
a legacy--that an antiques salesman offered to buy from her for the unheard of sum of $350.)
8. legacy – money or property left to someone by a will; bequest; something that has been handed down from an
ancestor or predecessor (Mrs. Gibbs uses this word to hint to her husband about a vacation she would like to take—if
she ever gets a legacy.)
9. Antietem – creek in Maryland where a major battle of the American Civil War was fought between Lee and McClellan
(one of the two spots Dr. Gibbs is willing to travel to in order to indulge in his hobby—honing his expertise on the
American Civil War)
10. brachycephalic – having a relatively short or broad head (term from anthropology, archaeology used in Professor
Willard’s speech—probably Wilder showing off a little)
11. diligent – hard-working, industrious (comes up in Editor Webb’s speech about the town’s natural interest in finding
a way to reward the “diligent and sensible” and let the “lazy and quarrelsome sink to the bottom”)
12. James Whistler ; his work “Mother” - American painter and etcher (lived in Europe mostly). “Mother” – first
American work credited for celebrating an ordinary person rather than a sacred or famous figure. It’s a picture in grays
and blacks of his elderly mother in a rocking chair (one of the few elements of culture that Editor Webb says everyone in
town knows about; serves to emphasize the theme of how important the ordinary, daily things in our lives are)
13. Versailles (Treaty of) – treaty between the Allies and Germany ending World War I, signed in a city in France (an
example from history of something everyone knows about; perhaps connects to other commentary about war—Joe
Crowell’s death in WWI, for example)
14. Lindbergh (his flight) - American aviator who made the first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. His son
was kidnapped and never found. (another common historic reference; connects to theme of appreciating what we have
while we have it-- we can’t think of Lindbergh without thinking of his son’s kidnapping)
15. unobtrusively – in a manner intended not to draw attention to oneself (stage direction for characters, usually
leaving a scene, in order to have the audience retain its focus on the central scene)
Our Town
Act I Quotations
Name:
Period:
Identify the speaker, explain what the quotation means and why it is important. (By the time you finish Act III, you should know why
each quotation is important since Wilder ties everything together in Act III.)
1.
p. 6
“The morning star always gets wonderful bright the minute before it has to go, doesn’t it?”
2.
p. 7
“Nobody very remarkable ever come out of it, s’far as we know.”
3.
p. 9
“Anything serious going on in the world since Wednesday?”
“Yessir. My schoolteacher Miss Foster,’s getting’ married to a fella over in Concord.”
4.
p. 10
“Joe was awful bright—graduated from high school here, head of his class. So he got a scholarship to
Massachusetts Tech. Graduated head of his class, too. It was all wrote up in the Boston papers at the time. Goin’ to be a
great engineer, Joe was. But the war broke out and he died in France. -- All that education for nothing.”
5.
p. 15
“As for me, I’d rather have my children healthy than bright.”
“I’m both, Mama: you know I am. I’m the brightest girl in school for my age. I have a wonderful memory.”
6.
p. 19
“If I could get the doctor to take the money and go away someplace on a real trip, I’d sell it like that.-- Y’know,
Myrtle, It’s been the dream of my life to see Paris, France.”
7.
p. 20
“…it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English
and don’t even want to.”
8.
p. 23
“Women vote indirect.”
Our Town Act I Quotations, p. 2
9.
Name:
p. 25
“…we like the sun comin’ up over the mountain in the morning, and we all notice a good deal about the birds. We
pay a lot of attention to them. And we watch the change in the seasons…”
10. p. 30
“I’m going to make speeches all my life.”
11. p. 32
“…I’m going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now’ll know a
few simple facts about us—more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight.”
12. p. 32
The choir is practicing the hymn “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds”
13. p. 36
“There you see your mother—getting up early; cooking meals all day long; washing and ironing;-- and still she has
to go out in the back yard and chop wood… And you eat her meals, and put on the clothes she keeps nice for you, and you
run off and play baseball,-- like she’s some hired girl we keep around the house but that we don’t like very much.”
14. p. 38
“To have the organist of a church drink and drunk year after year. You know he was drunk tonight.”
i. “Now…we all know about Mr. Stimson, and we all know about the troubles he’s been through, and…the
only thing the rest of us can do is just not to notice it.”
15. p. 40
“How’ll that end, Frank?”
16. p. 43
“Yes, most of the town’s settled down for the night, Simon… I guess we better do the same. Can I walk along a
ways with you?”
17. p. 43
“I don’t know how that’s goin’ to end, Mr. Webb.”
18. p. 44
“Haven’t any troubles on your mind, have you, Emily?”
i. “Troubles, Papa? No.
19. p. 45
“He wrote Jane a letter and on the envelope the address was like this: It said: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm;
Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America…Continent of North America; Western
Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God—that’s what it said on the envelope. … And the
postman brought it just the same.”
Our Town
Act I Study Guide
Name:
Date:
Period:
Answer the following questions as completely as possible.
1. Describe some of the different functions of the Stage Manager in this play.
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
2. What is the name of the town where the play is set?
3. Describe three important facts about the town.
4. Briefly describe the occupations and interests of the following people:
Gibbs
Dr. Frank Gibbs:
Mrs. Julia Gibbs:
George:
Rebecca:
Webb
Mr. Charles Webb:
Mrs. Myrtle Webb:
Emily:
Wally:
5. What conversation shows the limited perspective some of the townspeople have about “the world”?
6. What does nostalgic mean? Is Our Town a nostalgic play? Explain your answer completely.
Our Town
Act I Study Guide, p. 2
Name:
7. What does Mr. Webb mean about women voting indirectly?
8. What is Emily concerned about when she talks to her mother? What do you think caused her to be thinking
along these lines?
9. How does the moonlight affect the following people (if at all!):
a. George:
b. Emily:
c. Rebecca:
d. Mrs. Gibbs:
e. Mrs. Soames:
Our Town
Vocabulary
Act II
Name:
Date:
Period:
1. farce - foolish show; mockery; a ridiculous sham (Mrs. Gibbs describes weddings this way on the morning
of George’s wedding)
2. gangling - awkwardly tall and spindly; lank and loosely built (describes George’s awkward, youthful
appearance on the day he gets married)
3. meditative – deeply or seriously thoughtful (describes Mrs. Gibbs when talking over the importance of
marriage)
4. barren - not producing results; fruitless: a barren effort (describes Dr. Gibbs’ unfounded fears that he and
Mrs. Gibbs wouldn’t have enough to talk about early in their marriage)
5. alacrity - eagerness, keenness; fervor, zeal (describes Mr. Webb’s response to one of George’s questions
about marriage)
6. crestfallen - dejected; dispirited; discouraged (describes George in one scene)
7. affront – an insult; to insult (describes Mr. Morgan’s reaction to George’s not having any money to pay him
for the ice cream sodas after George’s and Emily’s important talk. Mr. Morgan is only pretending to be
affronted, though)
8. musing - absorbed in thought; meditative (describes the Stage Manager’s speech to the audience just prior to
the wedding)
9. contrive - to plan with cleverness or ingenuity (The Stage Manager uses this to tell how Nature has been
working over the years “pushing and contriving.” As people get older, many things change.)
10. exasperation - frustrated annoyance (Mrs. Webb expresses this in her speech just before the wedding—
aimed at herself and “the whole world” because she couldn’t find the words to talk to Emily about the wedding
night.)
11. cynicism - An attitude of scornful or jaded negativity, especially a general distrust of the integrity or
professed motives of others (what the Stage Manager does NOT intend to show when commenting on the
ordinary course of ordinary lives at the end of Act II)
Our Town
Act II Quotations
Name:
Period:
Identify the speaker, explain what the quotation means and why it is important. (By the time you finish Act III, you should know why
each quotation is important since Wilder ties everything together in Act III.)
1.
p. 46
“All that can happen in a thousand days.”
2.
p. 47
“Soon as they’ve passed their last examinations in solid geometry and Cicero’s orations, looks like they suddenly
feel themselves fit to be married.”
3.
p. 47
“I don’t have to point out to the women in my audience that those ladies they see before them, both of those ladies
cooked three meals a day—one of ‘em for twenty years, the other for forty – and no summer vacation. They brought up two
children a piece, washed, cleaned the house,-- and never a nervous breakdown.
4.
p. 52
5.
p. 53
“They’ll have a lot of troubles, I suppose, but that’s none of our business. Everybody has a right to their own
troubles.”
6.
p. 60
“You know how it is: you’re twenty-one or twenty-two and you make some decisions; then wisssh! you're seventy:
you’ve been a lawyer for fifty years, and that white-haired lady at your side has eaten over fifty thousand meals with you.
a. How do such things begin?”
7.
p. 63
“There I was in the Congregational Church marryin’ a total stranger.”
“Oh…I don’t think it’s possible to be perfect…”
i. “Well, my father is, and as far as I can see your father is. There’s no reason on earth why you shouldn’t be,
too.”
8.
p. 71
“This is a good wedding, but people are so put together that even at a good wedding there’s lots of confusion way
down deep in people’s minds… The real hero of this scene isn’t on stage at all, and you know who that is.”
9.
p. 72
way.”
10. p. 75
“Oh, I’ve got to say it: you know, there’s something downright cruel about sending our girls out into marriage this
“I’ve never felt so alone in my whole life…Papa! Papa!”
Our Town
Act II Study Guide
Name:
Date:
Period:
Answer the following questions as completely as possible.
1. When does Act II begin?
2. What impresses the Stage Manager about Mrs. Webb and Mrs. Gibbs?
3. What do you think Dr. Gibbs means when he says that he married a total stranger? (I’ve never heard of
arranged marriages at that time period. Think about it in a different way.)
4. What does Emily say to George that makes him sure that she is interested in him? It’s not what you might
think.
1. George and Emily both feel doubts before the wedding. How do these doubts reveal the passage from
adolescence to adulthood? (Think about how we know that they are being realistic about their future.)
6. How do Mrs. Webb and Mrs. Gibbs feel about their children getting married?
What do these feelings tell us about what is involved in being a parent?
What do you think they would say is the hardest part about being a parent?
7. How do you personally feel about marriage? How does one prepare for it? How old should one be before
marrying?
Our Town
Act III Quotations
Name:
Period:
Identify the speaker, explain what the quotation means and why it is important.
2.
3.
p. 79
“Gradual changes in Grover’s Corners. Horses are getting rarer. Farmers coming into town in Fords.
Everybody locks their house doors now at night. Ain’t been any burglars in town yet, but everybody’s heard about ‘em.”
4.
p.80 “Wherever you come near the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense…”
5.
p. 80,81
“…had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than fifty 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.”
6.
p. 81
“There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”
7.
p. 86
“Childbirth. I’d forgotten all about that. My, wasn’t life awful—and wonderful.”
8.
p. 89
“Don’t you remember, Mother Gibbs—the legacy you left us? Why, it was over three hundred and fifty dollars.”
9.
p. 89
“Live people don’t understand, do they?”
10. p. 89
“They’re sort of shut up in little boxes, aren’t they?”
11. p. 92
enough.”
“No!—At least choose an unimportant day. Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important
Our Town Act III Quotations, p. 2
12. p. 95
“I didn’t know Mama was ever that young.”
13. p. 97
“Yes—can’t think of anything that’s happened, special.”
14. p. 97
“I can’t look at everything hard enough.”
15. p. 98
“I want you to grow up and be a good strong girl.”
Name:
16. p. 100
“I can’t. I can’t go on. 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.”
17. p. 100
“Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners…Mama and Papa. Good-by 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.”
18. p. 100
“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”
19. p. 100
“The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.”
20. p. 101
“That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance…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… --that’s the happy existence you wanted
to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.”
21. p. 103
“You get a good rest, too.”
Our Town
Act III Study Guide
Name:
Date:
Period:
Discuss the following as completely as possible.
1. Explain some of the changes that have taken place in Grover’s Corners at the beginning of Act III.
2. The Stage Manager says, “Whenever you come near the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense.”
What do you think he means by “nonsense?”
What do you think he thinks is important?
3. How do you think the Stage Manager feels about war? Give a reference from one of his speeches to support
your response.
4. What is not eternal?
How does Our Town, the type of play it is and the type of scenery it uses, try to reveal what is eternal?
5. Why is it so painful for Emily to re-live her twelfth birthday?
Why does she call living people “blind”?
6. How do you think Thornton Wilder wants us to live our lives every day? Support your answer with some
examples from the play.
Our Town Themes
Name:
Period:
As we go through the play, find examples or quotes that represent each of these themes.
1. We must appreciate what we have while we have it. The time we have on this earth is finite and fleeting.
2. There is something eternal about every human being; therefore, people have innate worth and dignity.
3. The ordinary things in life are important; they are the things we need to live fully.
4. Life goes on, right through our tragedies and triumphs. We need to pick ourselves up and get ready to face
another day, knowing it might be our last.
5. We all have something we are good at. Sometimes we are able to foster that talent and make a life out of it,
but sometimes other life events, like marriage and parenthood, require us to set aside our dreams. It is up
to us to make our marriages worth this sacrifice.
6. Live your dreams when you can. You may never get another chance.
7. There is something unifying in the day-to-day routines we all have as human beings. We are far more alike
than we are different.
8. We should cherish every moment of life with the people we love. We never know when they will be taken
from us.
9. Write any additional themes you believe are emphasized here.