Our Town Tragedy

Arguably one of, if not the, greatest American plays in history is Our Town by Thornton Wilder. Our Town is representative of small town living and the everyday goings on in the town of Grover’s Corners, which its citizens often overlook. Wilder’s play can be analyzed as a tragedy through the use of Greek philosopher Aristotle’s Poetics. Aristotle’s Poetics largely focus on tragic drama and the components that create a tragedy. One can use these components: mythos, character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle (Aristotle, trans. Butcher, I:VI) to evaluate the unique aspects which make Our Town such a classic example of tragedy expressed through American drama. Beginning with what Aristotle considered least important to a tragedy, spectacle,

Thornton Wilder vastly relies on his characters to carry the action of the play, due to its lack of spectacle or visual representation of the town. The characters, such as Mr. and Mrs. Gibbs, Mr. and Mrs. Webb, George Gibbs, Emily Webb or the Stage Manager (who plays several roles) create a relatable world through their actions and emotions as humans in a “normal” everyday life in small-town New Hampshire in the early nineteen-hundreds. As our textbook, THEA 1030 Introduction to Theatre: Cohen’s Theatre, states, “[A character’s] potency in the theatre is measured by our interest in them as people.” Wilder does an outstanding job of making the characters relatable despite the time period in which they live or the small town they live in compared to the often crowded cities of today’s world. Thornton chooses protagonists to live out his story, with fate and human blindness being the only antagonistic characteristics of the play. Acts I and II give the audience characters to care about and relate to in Emily and George and the relationship they naturally develop throughout the plot. Act III gives the audience a reason to explore their own emotions and how they would feel in Emily’s place seeing the world around her through supernatural means after her death while the only world she knows continues on without

Spectacle (or lack thereof in this case), Wilder’s creative use of melody, diction, and thought, and his heavily thorough use of character and plot to carry the story all combine to create an insightful look into the daily lives that many of us go through and never take a chance to observe. Wilder created a humanistic outlook from the supernatural world that showed many of us take for granted the small, everyday actions and interactions that take place among us which build the suspense to our inevitable ending. These elements, first laid out by Aristotle, put a natural twist on what is often seen as intangible literature or art when really, tragic drama is often a stylized representation of our true selves and the lives we often write off as