hornton Wilder’s ”One Town”
- Pages: 2
- Word count: 317
- Category: Character
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Thornton Wilder’s One Town is a three-act play about the people of the community of fictional Grover’s Corners. The town is like any average American town and the characters could be any average Americans. The story follows the life of George Gibbs and Emily Webb from being childhood friends, to lovers, husband and wife, until Emily’s death in childbirth. The other characters provide their own subplots into the play, representing the varied but interconnected stories which occurs everyday in many places.
The simple plot and seeming commonness of the play reflects a crisis that every average individual face in his daily life yet fails to grasp because of its being ordinary: realizing the significance of the little things that happen in life. The play reflects upon this in the last act when the dead and the living converge upon a cemetery. The scene is Emily’s burial. Emily remembers what happens on her twelfth birthday and after looking back, she realizes how much she took her mother for granted when she was alive. Mrs. Soames echoes her when she assesses life as being “awful—and wonderful” Life is wonderful but it is short, and this is something that most living people do not understand. “They don’t understand, do they?” Emily says of George crying over her grave. She thinks that he should be better off moving on and enjoying his own short life than wasting precious hours grieving.
The play incorporates many everyday occurrences that they seem to happen fast especially during Act I. These activities imply that the drama in our lives are not the big events but everyday events that the characters do in the play like eating breakfast, preparing for school, chatting with neighbors, feeding chickens, and the milkman making his delivery. These propel the stories of every individual, who tends to be too distracted to even notice.
