It has been a long time since I last posted to the Welcome to Our Town Blog. I hope everything is well with you and I thank you very much for coming back!!
It is my great pleasure to give you an exciting announcement about Our Town and Nagoya Players today.
Nagoya Players’ Our Town Cast & Crew has finally reunited and restarted the production. We’re getting ready to perform on June 12-13, 2021!!
I am also back with the production and so excited to tell you a lot more interesting and useful information about the show through the blog!! Please follow and check Nagoya Players’ Official Website constantly!! (https://nagoyaplayers.org/)
I wrote about the Production History of Our Town in Japan in a previous blog post.
Today, I will focus on the writer of Our Town, Thornton Wilder!! Learning more about the author is a great way of discovering how wonderful the story of Our Town is.
How much do you know about Thornton Wilder? Actually, I didn’t know about Our Town or its writer until I heard about Nagoya Players’ upcoming production.
Thornton Wilder, circa 1948
According to the History of American Literature, he belonged to the same generation as Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. He published his first novel The Cabala in 1926 and he continued writing until 1971, just 2 years before his death.
I then looked up his various jobs, activities, achievements and contributions to writing!!
First of all, Thornton Wilder is one of the greatest writers and playwrights in America. He won 3 Pulitzer Prizes in both Fiction and Drama ― for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Ray (1927), for the play Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). He really is a man of many talents and made several other wonderful works in the creative field. He was a playwright, novelist, essayist, translator, research scholar, teacher (French, German etc), lecturer, librettist and screenwriter. He has a wide range of different writing forms and activities. What creativity he has!!
For example, I recommend watching the film Shadow of a Doubt directed by Alfred Hitchcock to learn more about the world of Thornton Wilder. He was involved in writing the screenplay. I didn’t know anything about Thornton Wilder, so I didn’t pay much attention to the title sequence when I first saw this film, though I’m a fan of Hitchcock.
Shadow of a Doubt is one of Hitchcock’s classic suspense stories. It uses the theme of, “fear approaches gradually in daily life!!”
Here’s a quick synopsis of Shadow of a Doubt: A teenage girl named Charlie gets bored of living “an ordinary life” with “an ordinary family”. One day an uncle, also named Charlie, makes a surprise visit to her family’s Santa Rosa home. Uncle Charlie is especially loved by the younger Charlie. However, Uncle Charlie’s dark secret is gradually revealed and the ordinary life of an ordinary family starts to break.
Did you notice that the themes of “family” and “daily life” in Shadow of a Doubt are also in Our Town!? A girl named “Rebecca” is a character in Our Town and in this film and they are very similar!! In the dialogues there are some inside jokes that’ll make you chuckle and the daily conversation between the family members is thought-provoking. This is all very reminiscent of Our Town.
Additionally, Wilder loved music and wrote 2 librettos for his plays The Long Christmas Dinner and The Alcestiad.
In respect to his translation work, he translated various plays written in non-English languages like A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen and Morts sans sépulture (Men without Shadows) by Jean-Paul Sartre. Wilder was familiar with several languages such as French and German. American Academy of Arts and Sciences established the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation in 2009. Every other year they honor a practitioner, scholar or patron who makes a significant contribution to literary translation.
Furthermore, Thornton Wilder also sometimes enjoyed acting on stage and played small and big parts in some of his own plays. Please check Thornton Wilder’s Official Website if you are interested in learning more. You can find selections of his writing, biography, news, pictures and a variety of stories about Thornton Wilder and the people around him. The website also really helped me write this blog!!
(https://www.thorntonwilder.com/).
Did you know Thornton Wilder often came up with the ideas for his plays and novels while walking amongst beautiful nature? He strolled around cities and villages and wrote his thoughts down. He developed the concept and details for Our Town in such a way.
Tappan Wilder, Thornton Wilder’s nephew, commented about his uncle’s writing style in the afterword in 「ハヤカワ演劇文庫『〈演劇９〉ソーントン・ワイルダーI わが町』」(Dramas Series 9: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town):
“Wilder was originally not the type who wrote by shutting himself in his study…….he always wrote in a number of different locations.”
Thornton Wilder wrote the innovative Our Town in his own unique way. It is said that Gertrude Stein had a great influence on Wilder’s insatiable writing spirit. Gertrude Stein is another legendary American writer. Wilder and Stein first met at Stein’s lecture at University of Chicago in 1935. It was the most prosperous time in his creative career. Wilder also had lots of experience as a lecturer and as a teacher. Wilder and Stein hit it off and deepened their friendship through a written correspondence. They exchanged their views and thoughts on literature and their activities.
Wilder also travelled abroad, for he was a writer who gained inspiration from visiting other places. He went to Paris, France to see Gertrude Stein again and again, where they exchanged their opinions and thoughts on literature.
I would like to focus more on Gertrude Stein if there’s an opportunity in this blog.
Wilder’s Our Town is a masterpiece and has achieved great success. It was very well received after the first public performance.
I will focus on the innovative views and thoughts that are featured in Our Town in the next blog.
See you next time,
Atsumi Yamamoto
Content & Outreach
Nagoya Players
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