Thornton Wilder's Last Play Vanished into Thin Air. Or Did It?
nytimes.comhttps://archive.ph/0g4Eu Or Did It? https://youtu.be/uakS1jPO1KA Well… finally…
Now man is poised for one of the greatest moments in time. Spurred by a line in Vonnegut that 'Our Town is the best piece of writing in history," I recently read Wilder's three most famous plays. They're all fantastic.
Our Town is indeed my favorite. I haven't seen it produced - weirdly plays usually don't do it for me - but the joy of the unusual format and fhf remarkable third act really brought out the feels for me. Recommended reading! You might enjoy reading "Spoon River Anthology", by Edgar Lee Masters, which was one of the inspirations for Our Town. It's a cycle of short free-verse testimonies "spoken" by the dead in a small town cemetery. Reading them builds up a sort of kaleidoscopic portrait of everything that went on there over the course of a generation or two. Each of the characters only speak once, like a epitaph, so all the way through you're putting pieces together, and by the end you're really anticipating what the key figures in a couple of the sub-plots will say. It's really cool! the only place I have ever seen a Thornton Wilder play is in student theatre in high school