Word: wildernesses
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...belief that he could reach a wider audience by forcing each spectator to create his own setting from his imagination and his own personal experience, a more authentic reality thereby resulting. University was Wilder's goal, as he made clear near the conclusion of his off-the-cuff talk to 15,000 people at Harvard's 1951 graduation (at the end of which President Conant called Wilder's remarks "the most significant I have ever heard from an academic man on a commencement program"). Wilder stated: "All literature is one expression of one human life experience. And when James Joyce...
...Town Wilder brings the usually unseen Stage Manager on stage. We see him suggest the Locale--Grover's Corners. New Hampshire--by bringing in some plain wooden chairs and a couple of tables, to which are added, as needed, a plank and, for a second-story window scene, a pair of step ladders. The Stage Manager also narrates background for us, guides the players, bridges time gaps, comments on what happens, doubles as a druggist, minister and an unnamed the woman (in early drafts of the play he took on several of the children's roles to boot), and dismisses...
...serves besides as Wilder's mouthpiece; and, in fact. Wilder himself played the part for a fortnight on Broadway and occasionally there after in summer stock. In a way. Our Town is almost as much an illustrated lecture as a play...
...Town struck its early audiences as highly unorthodox (partly because it lacked the normal theatrical suspense and conflict), but it was welcomed across the country in every city except Boston, where its chilly reception caused the run to be halved. Actually, Wilder's technique here evolved out of his own one-act plays of 1931, especially Pullman Car Hiawatha, where we find no scenery, minimal props, the versatile Stage Manager, and even the very name of Grover's Corners (located in Ohio this time, however), not to mention the prototype of Emily's valedictory apostrophe to the world...
...Even so, Wilder claimed no credit for invention. In the preface to an edition of three of his plays, he says, "I am not an innovator but a rediscoverer of forgotten goods and I hope a remover of obtrusive bric-a-brac." In Elizabethan times, after all, Shakespeare's plays were performed with few trappings. One need only read the Prologue to Henry V. which is an eloquent apologia for this manner of staging...