With a history of the Thornton Wilder classic coming soon, we talk with performers who found personal inspiration in the play’s beating heart.
Life is a quiet affair in Grover’s Corners, N.H. Its citizens don’t do drama or fuss. But Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” set amid the mountains there, is no folksy paean to simplicity. It’s a boldly experimental play about the beauty of the everyday, and human beings’ tragic propensity to look right past that.
When that realization lands, late and joltingly, it arrives by way of a character we may have underestimated: Emily Webb, the brainy daughter of the town’s newspaper editor. She vows that she’ll make speeches all her life, then falls in love with George Gibbs, the boy next door. If the storytelling Stage Manager is the play’s marquee role, Emily is its beating heart — and a rare complex canonical part for young actresses just starting out.
After “Our Town” made its premiere on Jan. 22, 1938, at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J., it swiftly moved to Broadway, and won that year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama. In the decades since, it has gained a reputation for fusty sentimentality, a misperception that Howard Sherman’s new oral history, “Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ in the 21st Century” (out Jan. 28 from Methuen Drama), debunks through discussion of a dozen productions.
The New York Times chatted recently with eight actors who have played Emily: on Broadway and Off, in London and regional productions — two of them bi- or multilingual. Lois Smith, now 90, did “Our Town” a mere dozen years after its debut, on a college stage. Their thoughts on the role suggest just how capacious Grover’s Corners can be. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.
(A heads-up, though: There is no way to talk seriously about “Our Town” without mentioning its radical third act. Spoilers ahead.)
Helen Hunt
Broadway, 1989
I was replacing someone who was already in it, so that was very nervous-making. I was working with Eric Stoltz, who was an old friend of mine, and Spalding Gray, who I had a big creative crush on. I was so scared that my knees were shaking under my wedding dress in the second act for sure.
I went back years later and saw David Cromer’s production, and ultimately played the Stage Manager in that. By that time, I had lived; I had lost things. That sort of devastating quality of the third act hit home in a way that it never could have when I played Emily.
The best Emily I ever saw was in David Cromer’s production. She was quite a bit older, and I think having that life experience and being a wonderful actor made that part come to life more than it ever had 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 show. It was three months after I got married that I got the call to go to New York. My new husband stayed behind in Chicago. So it was this strange thing of leaving to go to New York, a newlywed, alone, to do this play about this girl who doesn’t leave. The sort of longing that I was having was almost polar opposite of her longing. But I was accessing those fears and that feeling of loneliness and yearning in service of Emily.
As I stand now in my life as a mother and as a widow, I’m really grateful that I had those years with that play and with Emily. I didn’t know at the time that it was preparing me for my own experience with death and with saying goodbye. Not many years after having stopped — my child was a toddler, near the same age as George and Emily’s child — my husband died. And I had this sensation: All of that time preparing as Emily, only to find out that I’m George.
Thallis Santesteban
Miami New Drama, 2017
They asked me to submit an audition video while I was on this road trip. I actually filmed it in a motel room in the middle of nowhere, Montana. I grew up in Mexico, and I had never heard of this play at all. So my friend kind of summarized it for me: “I think you’re a kid, and then you’re a teenager, and then you’re dead.” I read it as soon as I got cast. I remember vividly reading it and weeping on my bed.
Very few times had I worked in a room that was so bilingual, where not just in the speech but with the director I could go back and forth. It was a bigger thing than I realized — how much that part was going to sink in for me because of the going back and forth from Spanish into English that I do in my day-to-day life.
Lois Smith
University of Washington, circa 1950
The play is written with everything in mime — props, etc. — and that’s how we produced it. It was in the round. There were like four little ramps through the audience down into the center playing stage, and one night, my first entrance, I ran down the ramp, and I had in my hand the strap which was around my schoolbooks. And I slipped and fell — by accident. I sprawled on the floor.
The thing that was thrilling is that I knew exactly where the books were. The strap had come out of my hand and the books fell with me, and it was so exciting because of course we’d been doing the kind of sensory work that people do, studying sense memory. It was not long after the Russians first came to New York and changed the face of American theater, you know. I still remember it to this day as a little triumph. Because the sense memory was perfect: I had the books when I fell; I knew where the books went. It was not pretend. I had ’em.
Sandra Mae Frank
Deaf West Theater and Pasadena Playhouse, 2017
The first thing that comes to mind will always be this line, ‘Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute?’ One of my hobbies is creating art using one quote from each role that stays with me, and that line was one of them.
As a deaf person, we value communication above all. In Act III, when Emily speaks to the spirits, all of the spirits, hearing and deaf both, were looking straight into the audience. None of them made eye contact with me as Emily, and that added more layers because we deaf people require eye contact when talking 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 daunting. I remember being in kind of a high emotional state throughout the run, because I really wanted to do it well. And I loved Emily.
She didn’t have these issues of “Do I belong here?” She was part of this town, part of this community. She just lives her life with abandon in a way that I never felt I had the license to. I grew up in a very white town, Rumson, N.J., and I was one of maybe two or three Asians in my entire high school. It was hard. My career started doing “The King and I.” I played Tuptim in seven different productions over the years. Emily was that first opening to me, that “Oh! Maybe there’ll be more to my career than these stereotypical Asian characters.”
Mahira Kakkar
Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2008
To me Emily seems like the girl next door. I find that very appealing, and I feel that that exists in all cultures, all across the world. That’s the part that resonates with me.
There are definitely things in there that seem very New England — the fact that the lid is on a lot on the emotions. I come from a culture where, at least with my family, everything’s out in the open. People are very dramatic, and they use their hands when they’re talking, and they laugh and they cry. It’s almost Chekhovian. The director, Chay Yew, kept steering me away from that. He was like, “I don’t know if this is going to serve you in this play.”
Francesca Henry
Regent’s Park Open Air Theater, London, 2019
The pandemic has had me thinking about this play and Emily quite a lot. There’s this bit when she first dies. She’s looking down at the funeral party and she says, “They’re all shut up in their little boxes and they can’t see.” I live in London, and I’ve been shut up in my little box for a while at this point. Just this barrage of bad news and this specter of death and illness that’s been part of our lives for almost a year now, and even despite all of that opportunity to be enlightened about what is important, we’re still sort of all just shut in our little boxes, literally and intellectually, emotionally, politically. And we are really blind to what’s important.
When I first read the play, I thought it was a shame that Emily didn’t make speeches her whole life. But there is validity in a little life. It’s enough to live and to see people and to appreciate the act of living.
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More Than the Girl Next Door: 8 Actors on Emily in ‘Our Town’ - The New York Times
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