Our Town
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40 free Our Town trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
It is said that hardly a day has passed since 1938 without a performance of Our Town somewhere. Thornton Wilder took one small New England community, two families and a narrator who talks straight to the audience, and turned an ordinary morning, a wedding and a funeral into one of the most performed American plays. This quiz follows the play act by act: the Gibbs and Webb households, George and Emily's courtship, the Stage Manager's asides and the graveyard scene that classes spend the most time on. Famous lines are described rather than quoted, so the comprehension questions test what happens, who says it and why it matters. Later questions leave Grover's Corners for the theater itself: the first production, the film and television versions, the stars who have played the Stage Manager and the books and films the play has inspired. It is written for students revising the text, for casts in rehearsal, and for anyone who saw the last act once and never forgot it.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which New England state does Thornton Wilder set Grover's Corners, the small community at the heart of Our Town?
New Hampshire
New Hampshire gets the credit, yet the town is invented; the Stage Manager even reels off a latitude and longitude for it.
Q 02Which singer played the Stage Manager in a live 1955 television musical of Our Town opposite Eva Marie Saint?
Frank Sinatra
Frank Sinatra sang most of the songs between the scenes, and it stayed his only dramatic role made for television until 1977.
Q 03What happens differently at the end of the 1940 film of Our Town, a change Thornton Wilder himself approved?
Emily survives
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.
Q 04What animal is Bessie, who follows milkman Howie Newsome on his rounds in Our Town but is never seen on stage?
A horse
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.
Q 05How are the Gibbs and Webb families connected at the start of Our Town, years before George and Emily wed?
Next-door neighbors
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.
Q 06Which occupying power banned Our Town from its sector of Berlin in 1946, fearing the play was too depressing?
The Soviets
The Soviets blocked the production on the grounds that so bleak a drama could set off a wave of suicides among defeated Germans.
Q 07Which film star gave his final stage performance as the Stage Manager in a 2002 Broadway revival of Our Town?
Paul Newman
Paul Newman had first appeared in the play on live television in 1955, when he was young enough to play the teenage George Gibbs.
Q 08Which song, later the theme of a sitcom about the Bundy family, was written for a 1955 TV musical of Our Town?
Love and Marriage
Love and Marriage shares its title with the play's second act, and decades later it became the opening theme of Married... with Children.
Q 09Which star of The Big Bang Theory played the Stage Manager in the 2024 Broadway revival of Our Town?
Jim Parsons
Jim Parsons stepped into a part the playwright himself once took over for two weeks during the original Broadway run.
Q 10Which director, an admirer of Our Town, hired Thornton Wilder to write the small-town thriller Shadow of a Doubt?
Alfred Hitchcock
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.
Q 11How does Emily die in the third act of Our Town, nine years after her wedding to George Gibbs?
In childbirth
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.
Q 12Which day does the dead Emily choose to relive near the end of Our Town, against her mother-in-law's advice?
Her twelfth birthday
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.
Q 13Which part does the Stage Manager step into for George and Emily's wedding in the second act of Our Town?
The minister
Q 21Which troubled Our Town character, the church organist, lies under a gravestone carved with notes of music?
Simon Stimson
Simon Stimson drinks, and the town politely looks the other way; he later takes his own life and stays bitter even among the dead.
Q 22Which Our Town character ends Act I describing a letter whose address ran on to the solar system and the universe?
Rebecca Gibbs
Rebecca Gibbs, George's younger sister, is amazed that such a letter still arrived; in later years she marries and moves away to Ohio.
Q 23Which young Our Town character dies of a burst appendix on a Boy Scout camping trip before the final act?
Wally Webb
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.
Q 14Which sport is George Gibbs's great talent in Our Town, one that Si Crowell complains will be wasted once he weds?
Baseball
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.
Q 15What is the job of Emily's father, Mr. Webb, who gives the audience a political and social report in Our Town?
Newspaper editor
Newspaper editor of the Grover's Corners Sentinel, he cheerfully admits to the audience that his town is a rather dull place.
Q 16Over what treat do George and Emily first admit their feelings for each other in a flashback in Our Town?
Ice cream sodas
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.
Q 17What do George and Emily usually stand on in Our Town to suggest their upstairs bedroom windows?
Two ladders
Two ladders stand in for the bedrooms in the moonlit homework scene, and they are among the few physical objects the staging allows.
Q 18Which city does Mrs. Gibbs long to see in Our Town, hoping the sale of her grandmother's highboy will pay for it?
Paris
Paris stays a dream: her husband will not travel abroad, and the $350 the furniture fetched goes to George and Emily in her will.
Q 19Why does Emily cut short her return to the living in the last act of Our Town and ask to leave?
It is too painful
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.
Q 20Which major award did Our Town win in 1938, an honor Thornton Wilder collected three times in all?
Pulitzer Prize
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.
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.
Q 24Where does Dr. Gibbs take his vacations in Our Town, while his wife dreams in vain of a trip to Europe?
Civil War battlefields
Civil War battlefields are his one passion, and he worries that seeing Europe would spoil his own small town for him.
Q 25In Our Town, what does George Gibbs decide to do instead of going away to college?
Take over his uncle's farm
He plans to take over his uncle's farm, having realised that years at agricultural college would mean leaving Emily and everyone he knows.
Q 26What do the mourners carry at Emily's funeral in Our Town, as the dead look on from their chairs?
Umbrellas
Umbrellas shelter the funeral party, and Emily emerges from among them to sit beside Mrs. Gibbs, still anxious and talkative.
Q 27What title does the Stage Manager give the first act of Our Town, set in May 1901?
Daily Life
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.
Q 28In Act I of Our Town, where are the people sitting who quiz Mr. Webb about drinking, injustice and culture?
In the auditorium
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.
Q 29Thornton Wilder's first hit before Our Town, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, follows a bridge collapse in which country?
Peru
Peru, in 1714: the novel asks why those particular travellers were crossing an Inca rope bridge at the moment it gave way.
Q 30Which hit Broadway musical grew out of The Matchmaker, a comedy by Our Town playwright Thornton Wilder?
Hello, Dolly!
Hello, Dolly! arrived in 1964 with songs by Jerry Herman, a decade after its source play had itself been reworked from an earlier flop.