The Everyday and the Ordinary Theme Analysis

In act one, Wilder chooses to tell the story of a perfectly ordinary day, when nothing particularly exciting or extraordinary happens. While acts two and three represent significant occasions (a wedding and a funeral), they are important events in the lives of ordinary people. The play could just have easily have been written about other inhabitants of Grover’s Corners, or about the people of some other small town. In act one, Dr. Gibbs asks the paperboy Joe Crowell if there is anything important in the newspaper, and the biggest news that Crowell can relay is that a schoolteacher is getting married. Nothing particularly newsworthy happens in Grover’s Corners and even the characters themselves recognize the unremarkable nature of their town. In act one, Mr. Webb tells the audience that it is a “very ordinary town, if you ask me. Little better behaved than most. Probably a lot duller.” And when George is considering going off the agricultural college and asks Emily to write him, she doubts whether letters from Grover’s Corners would be very interesting.

And yet, Wilder’s play insists on the importance of the everyday, the typical, and the average. George tells Emily, “The day wouldn’t come when I wouldn’t want to know everything that’s happening here.” By even writing a play entirely about everyday occurrences, Wilder makes a statement that these ordinary things are valuable and worth preserving in art and literature. One reason for this is supplied by the stage manager. While thinking about the town’s time capsule, he notes that we know nothing of the everyday lives of people from the distant past. Epochal events and great leaders of history do nothing to suggest the particular, unique experiences of everyday individuals.

Our Town, by contrast, preserves such information. And when the deceased Emily revisits her childhood in act three, the other deceased characters encourage her to pick an ordinary day. As the cemetery in act three demonstrates, we all die. What gives an individual’s life significance in the grand scheme of things is in the little details of a life, the specific, everyday things that make one life different from another and make our individual experiences unique. There may be nothing exciting in the town newspaper of Grover’s Corners, but Wilder ultimately suggests that the most important things in life aren’t necessarily the things that end up on the front page.