Our Town, Memory and An Everything

One morning,I slept later than usual, then stood at the stove, stirring oatmeal with a red spatula in my right hand and holding a new book of poetry in my left. I had read about Joe Elliot’s new poetry collection, An Everything, in the class notes of my college alumnae magazine and immediately ordered the book and wrote to Joe. Like me, he is an English teacher. He lives in Brooklyn, and I hope, in my next chapter, that we might up for coffee and swap stories about the last four decades.

In my mind’s eye, Joe is wearing a flannel shirt and overalls. He’s playing George Gibbs in the production of Our Town that I directed my Senior year. We are doing a final run-through in the squash court of Davenport College, built in the sub-basement. It was a little black box theatre, and it was freezing in the winter of 1982. Joe’s scenes with Emily, whose real name is also Emily, are the ones I see whenever I return to Thorton Wilder’s play–a text I know almost by heart, having taught it often and directed it twice over the past 40+ years. 

Seth, my husband now of almost 40 years, had helped his roommate, Russell, transform the squash court into a theatre some years before. The four walls were painted black, and they had suspended a pipe grid from the ceiling. It, however, lacked heat, and we rehearsed in January and February.  When Editor Webb returned from giving a speech at Hamilton College, he told the milkman that it was so cold that  students’ ears were freezing off, and we all laughed in grim recognition. We hopped around between scenes, wore extra layers, huddled near an ancient space heater my mother lent us, watched our breath form tiny clouds. I wonder now why I didn’t rehearse somewhere else–surely, there were warmer venues, but the squash court was where we worked to bring the play to life.

It was Our Town at the boys’ school that saved me the autumn after my older brother died. Though I was the lowly Woman in the Balcony, inquiring of Editor Webb if there was much drinking in Grover’s Corners, the production offered me a community, a sense of belonging. Through theatre, I discovered purpose. I’d always loved acting and being in plays, but in Mr. Worth’s Our Town, it was as if Thorton Wilder, himself, was speaking to me. Sitting quietly in my chair in the cemetery, I listened over and over to Emily wondering why people couldn’t appreciate life “every, every minute.”  As the Stage Manager, Tommy Woodward, explained what grief meant in Act III, I wondered if, someday, my own sorrow would quiet down.

In high school, I did play after play, almost always playing character roles–only now, do I approach the age of the elderly parts I seemed destined for. Though I longed to play an ingenue, I reveled in the idea of being someone else–anyone else. In particular, I longed to be someone who had not just lost her brother, a someone who wasn’t always the “good girl” I felt I had to be in my family, in school, off stage. In college, working with a children’s theatre for two summers, I discovered that I was a director and a teacher, not really an actress after all. I fell in love with the process of shaping a production, encouraging actors to take risks, to really talk and listen on stage, to bring a play to life. 

Junior year, I directed Ah, Wilderness! in the Davenport College common room, using the same techniques I had honed in children’s theatre, ones I would use in every production I directed. First, we built the ensemble, came to know one another, played. Only then would the script follow. The formula worked, though some actors initially rolled their eyes at the start of the process–eventually, I helped the actors in our plays learn to trust each other–on stage and off. 

The summer following Ah, Wilderness!, Michael, who had played the father, died in a car accident–a memory that brought my brother’s death rushing back. To process my double grief, I decided to direct Our Town. 

Artie, who had also been in Ah, Wilderness!, said he would read only for the Stage Manager, and I was irritated until I heard him bring Grover’s Corners to life. He was exceptional. Emily and 

Joe and Artie were all seniors like me–I think Betsy–Mrs. Gibbs–and Nick–Editor Webb–and my friend, Ed, were seniors, too. Somehow, the production felt all the more tender because we would leave the lovely Yale campus in a few months and head into the unknown. Grovers’ Corners felt a little bit like a very chilly Eden. That production gave me Deborah, now one of my closest friends. Bob, whom I had known in another lifetime from back home on the Main Line, played Doc Gibbs. Tom, a boy on whom I had a crush, played Sam Craig. The play took shape.

Emily and George were magic. As we watched their two characters fall in love, we held our breath–they were innocent and earnest, every line landing exactly as it ought to land. Those iconic scenes–doing homework on ladders or drinking strawberry phosphates at Mr. Morgan’s  soda fountain–are hard to do without tilting into cliché, but they never did–each line was a discovery, each moment of connection filled with wonder. It was as if the two of them had taken up residence in a private snow globe, existing out of time, a tiny world the two of them made that we glimpsed. Directing them meant getting out of their way, allowing them to breathe life into Wilder’s Emily and George, as surely as if they had been born to the roles, to the act of falling in love. 

We were very excited when Miss Isabel Wilder, Thornton’s sister, agreed to attend the production, and we were deflated when she pronounced my choice of having the ensemble carry dead Emily in on their shoulders in Act III ghoulish…I did feel vindicated when this year’s production on Broadway made the same choice. We recovered from Miss Wilder’s disdain, went on with our lives, graduated from college. The soap bubble memory of the play’s triumph floated into memory–iridescent, lovely, and the years spun by. Artie and I remain dear friends, and Emily and Deborah and I went to Europe the summer Our Town, sealing our friendship. Others from the cast cross my inbox from time to time. Everyone knows I love the play. When Tom Lake was published, lots of pals from college asked if I had read it. Did I love it? I did. This fall, Seth and I went to see the Broadway production–it was fine, but beyond the swath of lanterns that stretched like the constellations into the audience, which I loved, I was underwhelmed.  Our own production, decades ago, was imbued with so much love that it’s the one that has my heart.

I had lost track of Joe until I read about his new volume of poetry and stood, devouring his poems, marveling at past and present, making oatmeal as Mrs. Webb and Mrs. Gibbs might have at their coal stoves. Joe’s poems are worlds made of words–city life, middle-aged life, accidents, cruise ships. They drew me in. I read and read, trying to reconcile the brilliance of this poet past 60 with that boy in a cold squash court, tossing an imaginary baseball and bumping into an invisible Miss Corcoran, stuttering his love for Emily, weeping at her grave. He is a man who makes worlds with words–isn’t that what plays and poems do?  And, teachers, we use words to make worlds, too. We grow older. We carry all our selves with us.