Our Town

Grover’s Corners, New Hamsphire, located “just across the Massachusetts line: latitude 42 degrees 40 minutes; longitude 70 degreees 37 minutes,” is the setting for Our Town, Thornton Wilder’s Pultizer winning play, first produced at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey, 1938. Through the stage manager, who is speaking onstage and not working from behind the curtain, we are given a lens on everyday life in a small community, as life in Peterborough, New Hampshire might have been. Wilder was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough for nine years and was familiar with the town.

As life resumes and we emerge after spending months confined and restricted to our pods and neighborhoods, what is the shape of our lives in towns and communities across America? If we placed a lens on America today, as Thornton Wilder did, what would we learn?

While I am not one who watches television series, a writer friend encouraged me to watch an episode or two of the Canadian television sitcom Schitt’s Creek which streams on Netflix. The series ran for six years (January, 2015, to April, 2020) with over eighty episodes.

If you haven’t watched one of the episodes, and millions have making it one of the Nielsen’s list of top ten most watched series, it chronicles the life of a successful, entrepreneurial family, essentially a reality television family, who has experienced financial ruin and is forced to move into connecting motel rooms in a small rural community. The kind of motels that were popular in the ‘50’s with perhaps twelve units, one connected to the next. All the father, narcissistic mother and their two spoiled children, a son, and a daughter, are left with is their inappropriate designer clothing.

The original idea for the narrative came from Dan Levy, who created the series with his father, Eugene Levy. Both have prominent roles in Schitt’s Creek, with Eugene playing the father, Johnny Rose and Dan playing the gay, neurotic son, David. The episodes are funny and satirical each with a dramatic twist of one sort or another.

There are moments when you find tears running down your cheeks from laughing and other moments when your eyes fill with tears because of the humanity, empathy, and insights into how the Rose family is adapting to their new lives. How the community is responding to them as the years and the episodes move along and the family begins to recognize how vacuous and meaningless their lives have been. They begin to bask in the friendship, love and forgiveness that has been extended to them in Schitt’s Creek. David, in the last episode, makes the decision to stay and make the small town his home.

I have been reading Our Town and thinking about Schitt’s Creek as earlier this spring Congressman Ted W. Lieu from California’s and Congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernández from New Mexico introduced legislation that would create a 21st Century Federal Writers’ Project, inspired by the New Deal initiative of decades ago. The new program would allow the U. S. Department of Labor to distribute grants to academic institutions, nonprofit literary organizations, newsrooms, and libraries and to hire unemployed and under employer writes to chronicle our American towns, cites and the countryside. To observe and reflect on the shape of American life.

Credit for the inspiration behind the idea is given to David Kipen, who served as the National Education Association’s director of literature under both Democratic and Republican administrations and now teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. In interviews and in editorials he comments that the idea came to him during the pandemic when many of his friends were losing their jobs.

The original Federal Writers’ Project, created in 1935, was part of the United States Work Progress Administration (WPA) launched as part of the New Deal and designed to provide employment for historians, teachers, writers, librarians, and other white-collar workers who were unemployed during the Great Depression. While the original purpose of the project was to publish a series American guidebook the Federal Writers Project published hundreds of guides, local histories, and children’s books.

There are three acts in Our Town. In the last act one of the characters, Emily, who has died, asks to return for a day to observe what is happening. An ordinary day. She is warned against this idea as “you (will) see the future.” She does return and longs to have the day end.

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?”

A man from the among the dead:

And my boy, Joel, who knew the stars – he used to say it took millions of years for that speck o’ light to git to the earth. Don’t seem like a body could believe it, but that’s what he used to say – millions of years.

Emily:

“They don’t understand, do they?” *

Perhaps through their words and reflections on life in America writers, poets, librarians, historians, and journalists can bring us together to understand what it is we all have in common. It is, after all, our town.

* Our Town by Thornton Wilder, Harper Perennial Classics, reissued 2003. New York, New York