A Mundane Story to a Life-Changing Experience: The Act-by-Act Insights of Our Town Amogh Garudadwajan 10th Grade

Do human beings take life for granted? Pondering this question, it is fair to say that as a society, we’ve been steadily moving towards convenience, towards getting through everything as fast as we possibly can. With this desire for speed, we seem to be forgetting the value of life and appreciating it. We live in a world where everything is driven by efficiency, and human interaction is slowly becoming rarer. While this may seem like a very melodramatic description of our world, it’s truly not that far-fetched. The idea of “taking it slow” and the idea of all aspects of life having meaning are explored in the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder. Our Town is a play which tells the story of a generic American town, Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, which seems mundane at first, but then starts to show that meaning can be imbued into anything in life, even the insignificant parts of it. The first act of the play focuses on business-as-usual 1901 American life, which can be extremely dull, to say the least. A romance sparks between George Gibbs and Emily Webb in this act and is further developed in Act II. This part of the play, “Love and Marriage”, is all about George and Emily’s wedding, arguably a very significant event in their...