Our Town

Today is the birthday of novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder, born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1897 and died in 1975. He's best known for writing Our Town (1938), a play about a woman who grows up in a small New England town, dies, and gets a chance to look back on her life and realize how much she failed to notice. How good that small life really was.

Our Town been my favorite play script for many years. I get it off of the shelf and read it every couple of years and always laugh and cry at the same spots. I've always wanted to play the role of the stage manager. One of the great roles in American theater.

I've also wondered for years why productions of this play, or at least any I've heard of, don't use live New England contra dance music for their background music. It seems like that music would do so much to reinforce the small-town "American-ness" of the script.

Maybe someday.