Dec 29, 2009

Our Town | Style

Experimental Techniques
When Our Town was first performed in 1938, Thornton Wilder was better known as the Pulitzer prize-winning (1927) author of a novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Unhappy with most of what he was seeing on the American stage, Wilder decided to introduce a different approach to theater. He explains his idea in the preface to Three Plays by Thornton Wilder (Bantam, 1958):

Toward the end of the twenties I began to lose pleasure in going to the theater. I ceased to believe in the stories I saw presented there . . I...