Life is a quiet affair in Grover’s Corners, NH. The citizens do not do drama or uproar. But Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’, in the midst of the mountains there, is not a stranger. It is a brave experimental play about the beauty of the everyday, and the tragic tendency of man to look past it.
When the realization ends up late and shocking, it comes down to a character we may have underestimated: Emily Webb, the sad daughter of the city’s newspaper editor. She promises to give speeches all her life, and then falls in love with George Gibbs, the boy next door. If the stage narrator is the playwright of the play, Emily is the beating heart of it – and a rare complex canonical part for young actresses who have just started.
After “Our Town” premiered on January 22, 1938 at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, NJ, it quickly moved to Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In the decades that followed, it gained a reputation for a fustent sentimentality, a misperception that Howard Sherman’s new oral history, ‘Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’ Our Town ‘in the 21st Century’ (from January 28 by Methuen Drama ), debunks. by discussing a dozen productions.
The New York Times recently spoke to eight actors who have played Emily: on Broadway and Off, in London and local productions – two of them bilingual or multilingual. Lois Smith (now 90) did a dozen years on a university stage a dozen years after her debut. Their thoughts on the role suggest how spacious Grover’s Corners can be. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.
(A head-up, though: there’s no way to talk seriously about “Our Town” without mentioning the intrusive third industry. Spoil before.)
Helen Hunt
Broadway, 1989
I replaced someone who was already in it, so it was very nervous. I worked with Eric Stoltz, who was an old friend of mine, and Spalding Gray, on which I was very creative. I was so scared that my knees in the second act shook for sure under my wedding dress.
I went back years later and saw David Cromer’s production and finally played the stage manager in it. By that time I was alive; I lost things. The kind of devastating quality of the third act succeeded in a way it could never do when I played Emily.
The best Emily I’ve ever seen was in the production of David Cromer. She was quite a bit older, and I think the fact that I had an amazing actor and that he was an amazing actor made the part more lively than ever before. Her name is Jennifer Grace.
Jennifer Grace
The Hypocrites, Chicago; Off Broadway; and the Broad Stage, Santa Monica, Ca., 2008-2012
I was engaged when we started the program. It’s three months after I’m married that I’m getting the call to go to New York. My new husband stayed behind in Chicago. So it was this weird thing to leave to go to New York, a newlywed, alone, to do this play about this girl not leaving. The kind of longing I had was almost opposite to her longing. But I gained access to these fears and that feeling of loneliness and longing in Emily’s service.
Since I now stand as a mother and widow in my life, I am very grateful that I had those years with that play and Emily. I did not know at the time that it was preparing me for my own experience with death and saying goodbye. Not many years after I stopped – my child was a toddler, almost the same age as the child of George and Emily – my husband died. And I had this feeling: All the time preparing as Emily, only to find out I was George.
Thallis Santesteban
Miami New Drama, 2017
They asked me to submit an audition video while I was on this trip. I actually filmed it in a motel room in the middle of nowhere, Montana. I grew up in Mexico, and I have never heard of this play. So my friend summed it up for me: “I think you’re a kid and then a teenager and then you’re dead.” I read it as soon as I was thrown. I remember reading it live and crying on my bed.
I worked very few times in a bilingual room, where I could not only go back and forth with the director, but also with the director. It was a bigger thing than I realized – how much that part is going to sink in for me as a result of going back and forth from Spanish to English that I do in my daily life.
Lois Smith
University of Washington, circa 1950
The play was written with everything in mime – props, etc. – and that’s how we made it. It was around. There were like four small driveways through the audience to the middle stage, and one night, with my first entrance, I ran down the driveway and had the strap around my school books in my hand. And I slipped and fell – by accident. I sprawled on the floor.
The thing that was exciting was that I knew exactly where the books were. The tape came out of my hand and the books collapsed, and it was so exciting, because of course we did the kind of sensory work that people do, and we studied memory. It was not long after the Russians came to New York for the first time and changed the face of American theater. I still remember it to this day as a small triumph. Because the sensory memory was perfect: I had the books when I fell; I knew where the books were going. It was not pretending. I had them.
Sandra Mae Frank
Deaf West Theater and Pasadena Playhouse, 2017
The first thing that comes to mind is always this rule: ‘Do people ever realize life while living it? – every, every minute? ‘One of my hobbies is to create art using one quote from every role that sticks with me, and that line was one of them.
As a deaf person, we value communication above all else. In Act III, when Emily spoke to the spirits, all the spirits, both hearing and deaf, looked directly at the audience. None of them made contact with me Emily, and it added more layers because our deaf need eye contact when we talk to each other.
Yumi Iwama
National Asian American Theater Company, New York, 1994
The idea that I was this Asian actress playing this iconic American role was just terrifying. I remember being in a high emotional state throughout the course because I wanted to do it really well. And I loved Emily.
She did not have these issues of “Do I belong here?” She was part of this town, part of this community. She just lives her life with dedication in a way I never felt I had the license. I grew up in a very white city, Rumson, NJ, and I was one of maybe two or three Asians in my entire high school. It was difficult. My career has been doing ‘The King and I’. ‘I’ve played Tuptim in seven different productions over the years. Emily was the first opening for me, that ‘Oh! Maybe there’s more to my career than these stereotypical Asian characters. ”
Mahira Kakkar
Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2008
To me, Emily looks like the girl next door. I find it very attractive, and I feel that it exists in all cultures, around the world. This is the part that resonates with me.
There are definitely things out there that look a lot like New England – the fact that the lid is very much on the emotions. I come from a culture where, at least with my family, everything is in public. People are very dramatic, and they use their hands when they talk, and they laugh and cry. This is hardly Chekhovs. The director, Chay Yew, still sent me away from it. He was like, ‘I do not know if this will serve you well in this play.’
Francesca Henry
Regent’s Park Open Air Theater, London, 2019
The pandemic reminded me quite a bit of this play and Emily. There’s a little when she first dies. She looks down at the funeral party and she says, “They’re all locked in their boxes and can’t see.” I live in London and have been locked in my little box for a while at this point. Just this barrage of bad news and this ghost of death and disease that has been a part of our lives for almost a year now, and even despite all the opportunity to be relieved about what is important, we are still just like us small boxes, literally and intellectually, emotionally, politically. And we are really blind to what is important.
When I first read the play, I thought it was a pity that Emily had not given speeches all her life. But there is validity in a little life. It is enough to live and to see people and to appreciate the way of life.