![]() ![]() ![]() You can see why there’s a spike in the “Our Town” market. Tappan Wilder, the playwright’s nephew and literary executor, professional productions have doubled since 2005, including two separate hit revivals newly opened in Chicago and New York. Requiring no scenery and many players, “Our Town” is the perennial go-to “High School Play.” But according to A. ![]() In the 71 years since, Wilder’s drama has become a permanent yet often dormant fixture in our culture, like the breakfront that’s been in the dining room so long you stopped noticing its contents. ![]() had the gall to endorse a mammoth transcontinental highway construction program to put men back to work. The Times’s front page told of 100,000 auto workers protesting layoffs in Detroit and of a Republican official attacking the New Deal as “fascist.” Though no one was buying cars, F.D.R. “WHEREVER you come near the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense,” says the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” Those words were first heard by New York audiences in February 1938, as America continued to reel from hard times. SOME THINGS DON’T CHANGE IN GROVERS CORNERS by FRANK RICH This piece appeared in The New York Times on March 7, 2009 ![]()
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