Grover's Corners vs. Charlottesville

We in the small hamlet of Tyringham, Massachusetts recently completed a community-based, site-specific production of Thornton Wilder’s classic play, Our Town.

That means we put on a show that, according to the producer, Ann Gallo, “engages and celebrates a community.” We did that over an 18-month period, involving more than 50 residents directly and nearly all the other approximately 350 residents indirectly. Everyone in town knew about the production and everyone as far as we could tell supported it. Finally, the play was staged outdoors—at the Tyringham Union Church and in the field adjacent to the cemetery, on a windy hill, just like in Grover’s Corner’s, the town depicted in Our Town.

We had capacity audiences for all our performances. They came from all over Berkshire County and beyond. The cast and crew were overwhelmed by cheering crowds and standing ovations.

Why Our Town in Tyringham? Gallo says it best. Because the play gets to the heart of life “within a similarly small, quintessentially American town. Narrated by a Stage Manager the audience follows the Webb and Gibbs families as their children fall in love, marry, and eventually—in one of the most famous scenes in American theatre—die.”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about that idea, after Charlottesville. What does it mean anymore to be “quintessentially American”?

When I first saw the images of “Americans” walking on the University of Virginia campus with torches, when I saw them in helmets, with shields, and weapons, chanting their vile, hate-filled slogans, my stomach lurched.

After Our Town, I can’t help but compare Grover’s Corners at the turn of the 20th century to Charlottesville in the 21st.

The most militant character in the play is someone called “Belligerent Man,” who asks if anyone cares about social injustice and industrial inequality. The town editor, Mr. Webb, answers, yes, everybody in Grover’s Corners talks about “who’s rich and who’s poor,” as though that were an answer to the question.

The Belligerent Man then wants to know why they don’t do something about it. The editor, pretty uncertain, replies that townspeople help those who can’t help themselves and leave those who can alone. The old God helps those who help themselves philosophy.

You can see how at the turn of the 20th century in Grover’s Corners the seeds for the future were being sown.

But nevertheless the play elicits a sort of mindless nostalgia for small town America that takes us by surprise—in an, “Ah those were the days” sort of way. When you scratch the surface, you see a town that is patriarchal, white, and pretty much Protestant. WASPs without the money.

The editor describes the town’s people as lower-middle class, with some professional men, 10 percent illiterate laborers. They’re 86 percent Republican, 6 percent Democrats, 4 percent Socialists; the rest, “indifferent.” Women “vote indirect.” They are 86 percent Protestants, 12 percent Catholics—and the rest indifferent.

“Very ordinary town,” he concludes.

The most stirring controversy in Grover’s Corners seems to center on what to do about the “town drunk,” actually the choir director, Simon Stimson, who has seen a “peck of trouble” in his day and who isn’t cut out for small town life. There’s a lot of looking the other way where Simon is concerned. And about his role in the play, there’s a lot of critical consensus that Simon is a “closeted gay man.”

While looking the other way at social injustice and inequality, life goes on in Grover’s Corners. Children get married straight out of high school, going into it blind as bats. Women cook three meals a day, bring up children, wash, clean house, and do everyone a favor by not having any nervous breakdowns.

Flash forward deep into the 20th century when women vote “direct,” but are marching for bedrock equality, when blacks are marching and dying for civil rights, when gays are marching and dying for theirs, and where by the 21st century concern over rich vs. poor turns into a gathering storm of anger against the 1 percent. Suddenly Grover’s Corners looks less quaint and more like a starting point, leading to where we are today.

It’s chilling to think that those sweet white protestant professional families we follow and fall in love with in Our Town could in any way be associated with the likes of the white nationalists and Klansmen who brought hate and terror to Charlottesville. But listen to David Duke, Richard Spencer, and Christopher Cantwell when they’re not talking about the “vile filth,” meaning Jews and minorities, who are destroying their country. They sound so “American.” They want their first amendment rights, their constitutionally protected God and guns. They want their country back—a country that was once dotted with towns like Grover’s Corners—before women and minorities got uppity.

I keep imaging someone like Cantwell being dropped into 1904 Grover’s Corners. What would Doc Gibbs and Mrs. Gibbs and Editor Webb and Mrs. Webb make of him in their kitchen, say, when he puts his assault rifle on the table and draws his Glock out from his waistband?

Flabbergasted. That’s what they would be at the sight of him—and flummoxed once he started in on waiting for a leader who would not let his daughter be taken by a Jew and then chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” Or when he started talking about f**king niggers who steal and kill each other.

They would have no context for him or for what he was after—or why he would be on his knees before them, in praise of their America.

I can see their faces, full of puzzlement at first, then turning to despair, and then to fear as they begin to wonder what’s to come.

Pretty much like us today.

I think Thornton Wilder was onto a lot of this back in 1938 when his play was first produced on American stages.

It’s his voice I hear in Act III when the Stage Manager says, “Wherever you come near the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense.”

And I believe he had big things in mind. Wilder’s concerns were cosmic. He pondered the ancestors, “millions of them,” who came before, and he wondered also about the millions to come.

While we wait for what is eternal in us “to come out clear,” the best we can do when it’s our turn to be alive is to look at one another as though we really see.

Almost everyone knows Emily’s heartbreaking lines about all we miss in life, about not looking at one another, about not realizing life when we have it.

But hers are not the last words.

Once she takes her place among the dead, it’s Simon Stimson who tells her that the truth of life is “ignorance and blindness.”

And it’s Mrs. Gibbs who chastises him: “Simon Stimson,” she says, “that ain’t the whole truth and you know it.”

The last word belongs to the Stage Manager. Get a good rest, he tells us, winding his watch, leaving us, like the dead in the cemetery, waiting.

But we’re not in Grover’s Corners anymore—and there can be no rest.