Let’s Look at One Another

Photo by Monica Bourgeau on Unsplash

In my previous post, I mentioned having read a number of good books recently, so here are two more.

Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town could be a companion piece to the two volumes about near-death experiences in that post. Read it if you haven’t, or if you haven’t read it since high school, or watch it on YouTube. My friend, Sarah, a theater director, recommends the Paul Newman version (referring to the actor playing the Stage Manager). After rereading it last month, I watched the Hal Holbrook production, partly because I like Robby Benson’s and Sada Thompson’s performances. Or, like Sarah, you could travel to New York to see the well-reviewed current production with an interracial cast starring Jim Parsons.

My book group discussed Our Town because it’s the backdrop for Ann Patchett’s most recent novel Tom Lake, largely set in a Michigan summer stock theater. The novel is also set in a cherry orchard. (Get it? A Cherry Orchard?) And Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love is in there, too. I like a book with a lot of literary references, but you could enjoy the novel without an intimate knowledge of those works.

Patchett wants you to read the play. Her Author’s note reads,

I thank Thornton Wilder, who wrote the play that has been an enduring comfort, guide, and inspiration throughout my life. If this novel has a goal, it is to turn the reader back to Our Town, and to all of Wilder’s work. Therein lies the joy.

Edward Albee called Our Town “the greatest American play ever written.” So you have two pretty powerful recommendations, in addition to mine, of course. Both Patchett and Wilder urge us to look around, see each other, and try to appreciate how strangely miraculous life on earth is, even an ordinary boring life like most of us are living. Near the end of the play, Wilder’s Stage Manager tells us that “everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.” Even skeptics like NDE writers Sebastian Junger and Bruce Greyson suspect this is true. Might as well take some comfort.

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