"Our Town" Out of Town

There’s an old adage in the theater that says plays are not written, they are rewritten. For most of the twentieth century that rewriting happened on the road during two-week stints known as tryouts. These trial runs, in cities like Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, gave new productions time away from the critical spotlight to get their acts together and avoid landing belly-up on Broadway. Even so, the road to New York was littered with flops and tryouts rarely met with triumph. Take, for instance, Our Town, Thornton Wilder’s homespun tale of life in Grover’s Corners, which is wrapping up its fifth Broadway revival since the play’s 1938 debut this week. Despite its longevity, Our Town’s path to success was anything but certain. A collection of letters and revisions from Wilder to director Jed Harris, now at the Morgan, reveal a creative tug of war over the soul of the play in the weeks leading up to its New York premiere.

After a tense rehearsal period, the first road performance took place in Princeton on January 22, 1938. Things appeared to be going smoothly. Wilder telegrammed his critic friend Alexander Woollcott—to whom Our Town is dedicated—with an optimistic preview: “Your play glows like a pearl here.”¹

But cracks began to emerge during a planned two-week engagement in Boston, the final stop before New York. “Something is the matter at the heart of the play,” Wilder confided to Woollcott. He accused Harris of “devitalizing” the play’s early scenes into “homely, humorous, touching aspects of village life; of a wedding there; on to which is added a sad and all but harrowing last act” whose abrupt change of tone was certain to blindside audiences. “At the matinée yesterday there were stories of nose-blowings and sobs. A lady who called for a friend at five o’clock saw emerging a crowd of red eyes, swollen faces and mascara stains.”² The wife of the Massachusetts governor even phoned the box office to say the last act was too upsetting.

From his room at the Copley Plaza Hotel, a brisk fifteen-minute walk down Boylston Street from the Wilbur Theatre, Wilder dashed off a stream of notes and revisions. Although none of them are dated, all but two appear on hotel letterhead, linking them to this crucial moment in the play’s development. The Morgan’s collection also includes a lengthy rewrite titled “Appendix A” of a scene from Act 1 between the Stage Manager—the role currently played by Jim Parsons—and Professor Willard who gives the audience the geological backstory of Grover’s Corners.

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975), “Appendix A,” [January 1938]. Purchased on the Gordon N. Ray Fund, 1993; The Morgan Library & Museum, MA 4792.2. OUR TOWN © 1938, 1965 by the Wilder Family LLC. Published with the permission of The Wilder Family LLC, in agreement with and c/o The Barbara Hogenson Agency.

Harris ignored many of Wilder’s suggestions, choosing instead to make adjustments of his own. When Wilder asked what happened to his beautiful prose, he retorted, “Prose doesn’t play.” We shouldn’t assume that all of Harris’s changes were for the worse, however; Wilder was known to praise Harris’s contributions when he wasn’t complaining about them.³

Faced with tepid reviews and a slump in ticket sales, Harris was now considering cancelling the rest of the Boston run and bringing the production straight to New York. Weary and exhausted, Wilder decided to pack his bags.

Dear Jed: Now it’s time for me to retire from the play for a while and get a “fresh eye.” My eye has become so jaundiced that I can no longer catch what’s good or bad. I’m going to New Haven tonight and sleep for a couple days.

In a scribbled postscript, he added:

I shall be at the hotel from 6-8 working on some closing lines. Shall bring them to the theatre at 8:20. I hope to take the 9:00 train. If you feel seriously that I can be useful here of course I shall stay — Leave word at hotel or theatre. If I go, Ed Goodnow [the production stage manager] will notify me by telegram of where we are next week so I can rejoin. T.⁴

On a separate sheet, Wilder took another stab at the Stage Manager’s lyrical last lines before depositing them at the theater on his way to the train station.

From New Haven, Wilder tried to put a positive spin on the week’s defeats: “I suffered plenty this week in Boston, over cuts and alterations,” he told his lawyer, “but it was a lot of fun too.”⁵ In reality, he was disillusioned with the play. He grumbled to Gertrude Stein, “It’s been one long fight to preserve my text from the interpolations of Jed Harris, and I’ve only won 50% of the time. . . . The play no longer moves or even interests me.”⁶ And in a seven-page rant to his friend Woollcott dissecting the production’s shortcomings, Wilder refuted the charge that has dogged Our Town ever since: that it is a quaint and cloying portrait of small-town America, a cotton candy melodrama. “Jed’s happy interpolations” and poor casting were to blame for sweetening the play’s critical bite, he argued: “Our reviews say that it is a nostalgic, unpretentious play with charm. But what I wrote was damned pretentious. . . . I’d rather have it die on the road than come into New York as an aimless series of little jokes, with a painful last act.”⁷

Our Town retreated from Boston, but die it did not. Harris threw the cast back into rehearsal with only four days before the New York opening. His gamble paid off. Within four months Our Town won the Pulitzer Prize and by 1940 had been produced in no less than 658 communities across the United States and Canada. Wilder vowed never to work with Harris again, going so far as to warn Ernest Hemingway against collaborating with him too: “Use him for his great gifts—one play at a time only.”⁸ When the time came to produce his second play, The Skin of Our Teeth, Wilder found Harris’s gifts and his own cautious advice hard to ignore. Luckily, Harris turned him down.

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Dale Stinchcomb
Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts
The Morgan Library & Museum

Endnotes

1. Telegram to Alexander Woollcott, Princeton, January 21, 1938. Alexander Woollcott Correspondence. MS Am 1449 (1776), Houghton Library, Harvard University.
2. Letter to Alexander Woollcott, Boston, January 27, 1938. Alexander Woollcott Correspondence. MS Am 1449 (1777), Houghton Library, Harvard University.
3. A carbon copy of the script belonging to Harris that was acquired along with the revisions might yield a clearer picture of the extent of Harris’s changes, but it has yet to be compared to the prompt script used in rehearsals. See Typescript carbon of Our Town, [1937–1938], The Morgan Library & Museum, MA 4792.1; and Original prompt script of Our Town, [1937–1938], TS 3494.750, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Professor Willard is referred to in the Morgan typescript as Professor Pepper, one clue that it is probably an early draft.
4. Letter from Thornton Wilder to Jed Harris, Boston, [January 28, 1938]; The Morgan Library & Museum, MA 4792.6.
5. Wilder to J. Dwight Dana, New Haven, January 29, 1938, in The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder, eds. Robin G Wilder and Jackson R. Bryer (Harper, 2008), 338.
6. Wilder to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, New Haven, February 1, 1938, in The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, eds. Edward M. Burns et al. (Yale University Press, 1996), 207.
7. Letter to Alexander Woollcott, Boston, January 27, 1938. Alexander Woollcott Correspondence. MS Am 1449 (1777), Houghton Library, Harvard University.
8. Wilder to Ernest Hemingway, New York, March 1, 1938, The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder, eds. Robin G Wilder and Jackson R. Bryer (Harper, 2008), 340.