40 Fun Facts About Our Town

In which New England state does Thornton Wilder set Grover's Corners, the small community at the heart of Our Town?

New Hampshire gets the credit, yet the town is invented; the Stage Manager even reels off a latitude and longitude for it.

Which singer played the Stage Manager in a live 1955 television musical of Our Town opposite Eva Marie Saint?

Frank Sinatra sang most of the songs between the scenes, and it stayed his only dramatic role made for television until 1977.

What happens differently at the end of the 1940 film of Our Town, a change Thornton Wilder himself approved?

Emily survives because the film turns the graveyard act into a dream she wakes from; the playwright agreed that on screen her death would feel disproportionately cruel.

What animal is Bessie, who follows milkman Howie Newsome on his rounds in Our Town but is never seen on stage?

A horse, not a cow: Bessie is mimed like everything else, and she knows the milk route so well that she resists any change to it.

How are the Gibbs and Webb families connected at the start of Our Town, years before George and Emily wed?

Next-door neighbors, with the doctor's household on one side and Mr. Webb's on the other, so George can see Emily at her desk from his own window.

Which occupying power banned Our Town from its sector of Berlin in 1946, fearing the play was too depressing?

The Soviets blocked the production on the grounds that so bleak a drama could set off a wave of suicides among defeated Germans.

Which film star gave his final stage performance as the Stage Manager in a 2002 Broadway revival of Our Town?

Paul Newman had first appeared in the play on live television in 1955, when he was young enough to play the teenage George Gibbs.

Which song, later the theme of a sitcom about the Bundy family, was written for a 1955 TV musical of Our Town?

Love and Marriage shares its title with the play's second act, and decades later it became the opening theme of Married... with Children.

Which star of The Big Bang Theory played the Stage Manager in the 2024 Broadway revival of Our Town?

Jim Parsons stepped into a part the playwright himself once took over for two weeks during the original Broadway run.

Which director, an admirer of Our Town, hired Thornton Wilder to write the small-town thriller Shadow of a Doubt?

Alfred Hitchcock later named the film the one he most enjoyed making, thanks to his pleasant memories of working on the script with the playwright.

How does Emily die in the third act of Our Town, nine years after her wedding to George Gibbs?

In childbirth, delivering her second baby: her cousin Sam Craig arrives back in town for the funeral, and that is how the audience learns who has died.

Which day does the dead Emily choose to relive near the end of Our Town, against her mother-in-law's advice?

Her twelfth birthday is the day she picks, although Mrs. Gibbs warns her that going back is a bad idea; reliving it proves more than Emily can bear.

Which part does the Stage Manager step into for George and Emily's wedding in the second act of Our Town?

The minister is one of several small parts the narrator fills in himself, which lets him step out of the ceremony and talk to the audience about weddings.

Which sport is George Gibbs's great talent in Our Town, one that Si Crowell complains will be wasted once he weds?

Baseball makes him the school hero, and Emily tells him to his face that the success has made him conceited; he thanks her for the honest criticism.

What is the job of Emily's father, Mr. Webb, who gives the audience a political and social report in Our Town?

Newspaper editor of the Grover's Corners Sentinel, he cheerfully admits to the audience that his town is a rather dull place.

Over what treat do George and Emily first admit their feelings for each other in a flashback in Our Town?

Ice cream sodas follow a frank walk home from school, and by the time they are finished George has decided not to go away to college.

What do George and Emily usually stand on in Our Town to suggest their upstairs bedroom windows?

Two ladders stand in for the bedrooms in the moonlit homework scene, and they are among the few physical objects the staging allows.

Which city does Mrs. Gibbs long to see in Our Town, hoping the sale of her grandmother's highboy will pay for it?

Paris stays a dream: her husband will not travel abroad, and the $350 the furniture fetched goes to George and Emily in her will.

Why does Emily cut short her return to the living in the last act of Our Town and ask to leave?

It is too painful to watch her family hurry through a morning none of them knows is precious, so she says goodbye to the world and returns to the dead.

Which major award did Our Town win in 1938, an honor Thornton Wilder collected three times in all?

Pulitzer Prize number two for him: the first had gone to a novel ten years earlier, and a third followed in 1943 for another play.

Which troubled Our Town character, the church organist, lies under a gravestone carved with notes of music?

Simon Stimson drinks, and the town politely looks the other way; he later takes his own life and stays bitter even among the dead.

Which Our Town character ends Act I describing a letter whose address ran on to the solar system and the universe?

Rebecca Gibbs, George's younger sister, is amazed that such a letter still arrived; in later years she marries and moves away to Ohio.

Which young Our Town character dies of a burst appendix on a Boy Scout camping trip before the final act?

Wally Webb, Emily's little brother, is first seen squabbling with her over breakfast and is already sitting among the dead when the last act opens.

Where does Dr. Gibbs take his vacations in Our Town, while his wife dreams in vain of a trip to Europe?

Civil War battlefields are his one passion, and he worries that seeing Europe would spoil his own small town for him.

In Our Town, what does George Gibbs decide to do instead of going away to college?

He plans to take over his uncle's farm, having realised that years at agricultural college would mean leaving Emily and everyone he knows.

What do the mourners carry at Emily's funeral in Our Town, as the dead look on from their chairs?

Umbrellas shelter the funeral party, and Emily emerges from among them to sit beside Mrs. Gibbs, still anxious and talkative.

What title does the Stage Manager give the first act of Our Town, set in May 1901?

Daily Life is followed by an act on courtship and weddings, and he leaves the audience to work out the subject of the third for themselves.

In Act I of Our Town, where are the people sitting who quiz Mr. Webb about drinking, injustice and culture?

In the auditorium: the questioners are cast members seated among the paying audience, listed as a woman in the balcony, a man at the back and a lady in a box.

Thornton Wilder's first hit before Our Town, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, follows a bridge collapse in which country?

Peru, in 1714: the novel asks why those particular travellers were crossing an Inca rope bridge at the moment it gave way.

Which hit Broadway musical grew out of The Matchmaker, a comedy by Our Town playwright Thornton Wilder?

Hello, Dolly! arrived in 1964 with songs by Jerry Herman, a decade after its source play had itself been reworked from an earlier flop.

Which hymn is rehearsed in Act I of Our Town and sung again at Emily's funeral?

Blessed Be the Tie That Binds is first practiced by the church choir for a wedding, so by the last act the same tune has marked the town's joy and its grief.

In which university town did Our Town have its very first performance in January 1938, before Boston and Broadway?

Princeton's McCarter Theatre staged the premiere on January 22; the playwright knew the town well, having earned his master's degree there in 1926.

Which college gives Our Town paperboy Joe Crowell a scholarship before he goes off to die in wartime France?

MIT turns him into a promising engineer who graduates top of his class, and the narrator notes drily that the war wasted every bit of it.

The exact latitude and longitude the Stage Manager gives for Grover's Corners in Our Town really point to where?

Sea off Massachusetts: the coordinates fall about 300 meters from the shore at Rockport, well away from any inland village.

Which American composer wrote the Oscar-nominated score for the 1940 film of Our Town and later made it a concert suite?

Aaron Copland aimed for clean, clear sounds to carry the story's serenity, and he dedicated the ten-minute suite to Leonard Bernstein.

Which actress played Emily in the original Broadway cast of Our Town and again in the 1940 film, her screen debut?

Martha Scott earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination for the film, and four years later she was back on stage as Emily in a New York revival.

In Our Town, a copy of the play itself is to be sealed in the cornerstone of which new building?

The bank will hold a time capsule, the Stage Manager explains, so that people a thousand years from now will know how ordinary townsfolk really lived.

Which Lars von Trier film, starring Nicole Kidman on a nearly bare soundstage, reminded critics of Our Town?

Dogville marks out its houses and even its gooseberry bushes as white outlines painted on the floor, each one labelled with its name.

Which Ann Patchett novel turns on a mother's memories of acting in Our Town at a theater company in the 1980s?

Tom Lake is the name of the theater company itself, and the three daughters who hear the story include one named Emily.

Which actor was Broadway's first Stage Manager in Our Town, with his own son John cast as George Gibbs?

Frank Craven repeated the part in the 1940 film and helped write its screenplay, though on screen his son's role went to William Holden.