Our Town | Style

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 m the stories I saw presented there . . I felt that something had gone wrong with it [the theater] in my time and that it was fulfilling only a small part of its potentialities.

Our Town was considered innovative for its time because of the experimental techniques Wilder incorporated into the play. The Stage Manager, a character both inside and outside the play,...
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