THEATER CHRONICLE
55
fashion to the audience. That this American method of seeing and trans–
lating experience has its dangers and limitations, that it readily drops
into mere homeliness and triviality, the present state of the commercial
theater testifies. This method, however, has within itself the power of
expansion; Mr. Blitzstein's method can only contract.
Mr. Thornton Wilder's play,
Our Town,
at the Morosco, is the
inverse of
The Cradle Will Rock.
Both plays are done without settings
or props; both employ a commentator who serves as intermediary be–
tween actors and audience; both deal with an American town. But while
Mr. Blitzstein is a sort of public prosecutor of Steeltown of 1937, Mr.
Frank Craven, stage manager and spokesman for Mr. Wilder, appears
as a kind of indulgent defense attorney for a certain small New England
town of thirty years ago. Mr. Blitzstein evokes an industrial town which
is
abstract and odious; Mr. Craven and Mr. Wilder, a home town which
is
concrete and dear.
Our Town,
like
Ah, Wilderness,
is an exercise in
memory, but it differs from the O'Neill work in that it is not a play in
the accepted sense of the term. It is essentially lyric, not dramatic. The
tragic velocity of life, the elusive nature of experience, which can never
be
stopped or even truly felt at any given point, are the themes of the
play-themes familiar enough in lyric poetry, but never met, except
incidentally, in drama. Mr. Wilder, in attempting to give these themes
theatrical form, was obliged, paradoxically, to abandon almost all the
conventions of the theater.
In the first place, he has dismissed scenery and props as irrelevant
to, and, indeed, incongruous with his purpose. In the second place, he
has invented the character of the stage manager, an affable, homespun
conjuror who holds the power of life and death over the other charac–
ters, a local citizen who is in the town and outside of it at the same time.
In the third place, he has taken what is accessory to the ordinary play,
that is, exposition, and made it the main substance of his. The greater
part of the first two acts is devoted to the imparting of information, to
situating the town in time, space, politics, sociology, economics, and
geology. But where in the conventional play, such pieces of information
are insinuated into the plot or sugared over with stage business and
repartee, in Mr. Wilder's play they are communicated directly; they take
the place of plot, stage business, and repartee. Mr. Craven himself
tells the biographies of the townspeople; he calls in an expert from the
state college to give a scientific picture of the town, and the editor of
the local newspaper to describe its social conditions. The action which
is intermittently progressing on the stage merely illustrates Mr. Craven's
talk.
Mr. Wilder's (ourth innovation ·., tne . · st
u . • ' ••
~..,
in order to
dramatize his feelings about life he has
m<'~~
1
.:y raised the dead. At the
opening of the third act a group of people are discovered sitting in rows
on one side of the stage; some of the faces are familiar, some are new.
They are speaking quite naturally and calmly, and it is not until one
has listened to them for some minutes that one realizes that this is the
