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| Our Town: A Play in Three Acts (Perennial Classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: Thornton Wilder
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Category: Book
List Price: $10.95
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $10.94 (100%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  110 reviews
Sales Rank: 14214
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.3 x 0.6
ISBN: 0060512636
Dewey Decimal Number: 812.52
EAN: 9780060512637
ASIN: 0060512636
Publication Date: October 1, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy!
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| Customer Reviews:
Our Town - What a masterpiece December 2, 1999
13 out of 16 found this review helpful
The classic, Pulitzer Prize winning play Our Town was written by Thornton Wilder. Our Town takes place in a small town in New Hampshire named Grovers Corner and is set in the early 1900's. This play shows how life really was in the early twienth century. It also shows the trials and tribulations of a small town. Examples of this is Mrs. Webb having to deal with her daughter, Emily, getting married and George dealing with Emily's death. Some descriptions of the characters is that George is a young man who will do anything to accomplish his goals and ambitions. He has alot of goals such as being a farmer and getting married to Emily. Emily is a young woman who is very smart and she tries her hardest at everything she does. Emily seems to be a very nice and open minded person. Dr. Gibbs is a middle aged man who is willing to help anyone and everyone. Dr. Gibbs seems to be a very good man who never takes a break from work and has many ambitions. One part of the play that helps you understand the play is the part of the stagemanager. The stagemanager knows almost everything about the town. He also gives you details of events that happened in the past and what is happening at that moment in the town of Grovers Corners. This book is very easy to understand. You know that Dr. Gibbs is obviously the only doctor in town, that Emily is one of the brightest girls in her class, and that George really likes Emily. While reading it you will really get into the story, and you wont be able to stop reading it. You may even find yourself acting out some of the scenes. This play is classified as a drama as it tells of Emily as a young child, to marriage, and then ultimately to her death. This play is also a drama because it expresses love, happiness, sadness, and even hate. Every act skips a few years to just show how people change, the town changes, and just how life changes. Our Town is really a good piece of work. I believe anyone who reads this book will really enjoy it. Our Town really portrays life as it really is.
 To those who thinks this sucks November 21, 1999
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
Little children. I understand how boring you think this is. In written form it seems to ramble and is "much ado about nothing", however be in or see this play and your mind will change. Much of our lives are "much ado about nothing", but that is the point. Get past the nothing and realize that we are interconnected to all other humans. That is the theme. The show asks us to remember the small things - they eventually will have more meaning. Please re-read this book every five to ten years. It will mean more each time. I have performed this show twice - at sixteen (it meant little) and at 29 (it began to make sense). At forty I will hopefully do it again and if my forty something friends and seventy something parents are right - it will just get better the more life experience you gain. Please re-read or see it before you decide it "sucks"
 Unbelievable!! June 29, 1999
7 out of 12 found this review helpful
A completely unnecessary book. Our Town is a great play, full of complexities. But it is not written in Ancient Hibernian. It is written in good simple English. How could anyone need Cliff's Notes to understand this play? If you need these kind of notes to make sense of Our Town, you are too stupid to be reading anything at all.
Misunderstood classic May 1, 2004
7 out of 10 found this review helpful
Superficially a folksy, American nostalgia piece, "Our Town" spans the first thirteen years of the twentieth century in the life of Grover's Corners, a small village in rural New Hampshire. It's the archetypal town of the American Mythology: a place where the names on the oldest gravestones are the same as those of the townspeople today; where the doctor delivers twins before breakfast, and is home in time to shoot the breeze with the paperboy; where the kids share an ice-cream soda, their mothers sing in the church choir, and a girl grows up and really does marry the boy nextdoor. The play's fond recollection of an America that never existed was nostalgic even in 1938, yet Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama became an instant classic and remains one of America's most loved and frequently performed plays. America today is the shambles of a destroyed hope, the stillborn ruins of the way of life "Our Town" imagines but which in reality was never achieved. For those immune to the appeals of the American Dream, or more familiar with the reality of the American Global Empire, the play may seem deliciously rich in unintended irony. You could be forgiven for thinking the American preference for escapist, self-aggrandizing fantasy might account for its enduring appeal. Yet you would be wrong. Scratch the surface and "Our Town" is no quaint tale of hayseed family life. Wilder was an intellectual, an admirer of the avant-garde and the experimental works of James Joyce. Steadfastly minimalist in its presentation, engagingly postmodern in its insistence that we see the cast as actors rather than characters, and more thematically challenging than we are initially led to expect, "Our Town" is a work of social criticism which indicts us with personal responsibility for the way we see our lives. Wilder turns our nostalgia against us, demolishing our vision of the past as a Golden Age, and demanding we live here and now, simply and fully. The play shows ordinary lives in pursuit of universal meaning, and by confronting us with our own mortality it challenges us to explore our small allotment of years in the same way. This isn't so much a play of memories as a play about memory - private and public. It evokes nostalgia to warn against it, and argues instead for an acceptance of transience, a celebration of life while it is lived, and a recognition of that small, unknowable fragment of the self that is eternal. It's with this universalizing, evident in the final act, that "Our Town" transcends twentieth-century America and becomes an enduringly relevant work of art - one about memory, fantasy, and the power and price of both.
My Little Town November 19, 2005
7 out of 10 found this review helpful
OUR TOWN gives us American experimental theater in its most easily graspable form. Once you get the general drift of the thing, you remain interested, for Wilder has planned it so. He gives us a little at a time, like a fisherman letting out his reel, slowly, now, then for yards at a time, once we are hooked. The Stage Manager orders the actors about, and we seem to be let into two different worlds at once: the backstage look at the theater, and also, at the same time, God pulling his puppets from one end of the stage (birth) to the other (the tragic death that ends the play). Thornton Wilder, born in Madison, Wisconsin, grew up in China (Shanghai and Hong Kong) and made a study of Eastern religion at Yale, later at Princeton. All his life he remained fascinated by the patterns of things: birth, marriage, death.
OUR TOWN shows us a different view of small town life. Did you ever take an embroidered sampler off the wall and perhaps turned it around so you could see the back side, the knots and tangles, the rough switches, the mistakes hidden from plain sight? It's not a pretty picture, but without the fortification of error, we wouldn't have the homespun homily on the front side, under the glass. "God Bless This Home." In the play OUR TOWN we see, simultaneously, both sides of the picture. It's scary to turn up the rock and see the underside. Live things wriggle there. And death comes quickly too. As George and Emily maneuever through life from childhood to dating to a wedding, the Stage Manager rushes us through, always pulling at another curtain. What comes after love? More love or no love? OUR TOWN is all about sequence, but it illuminates sequence by asking us to imagine all life and death jumbled up on top of one another as though everything were happening at the same time. And yet still, none of us know, for a single second, the whole ecstasy of even one moment of our own lives.
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