In the Moment with Wilder and Wallace

Thorton Wilder received the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for Our Town in 1938. I saw it last Sunday at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York and at least once before in high school but I had little memory of it. The cast, led by Helen Hunt as the Stage Manager, was extraordinary, each character so fully realized that the little black-box theater was transformed into Grover's Corners and the audience sat agape.

There is a wrenching (literally) moment at the end of the play when the Stage Manager rips a curtain back along a rod to reveal one of the most beautiful, holy came to mind, scenes I've been witness to. Minutes before, the audience is slightly aware of a cooking smell or sense of cooking, but it was hard to figure which exactly... a nearby restaurant, gearing up for an early supper crowd? And then the revelation is before us, a visual epiphany.

Emily Webb has died but asks to return to Grover's Corners for just a day, one ordinary day. This is what is behind the dark curtain and where, for the first time, she actually sees her life in the moment, in the kitchen of her home.

Mrs. Webb is frying bacon, (for real) making coffee and scrambling eggs just as she has done every morning for her family. Sunlight fills the room, the milkman stamps snow off his boots before coming through the door with his clinking bottles, the newsboy delivers the morning paper. Emily's sudden awareness to what is real and essential is in plain sight for the first time, not in her life, but in her death. A stunning moment of collective self realization decended over the audience.

The late writer, David Foster Wallace, tells a story, "There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, Morning, boys, how's the water? And the two young fish swim on for bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, What the hell is water?"

Wallace says that "we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: This is water, this is water. It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out. True freedom means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."

I learned today that a friend and neighbor played George Gibbs in one production where Thornton Wilder was the Stage Manager. "I just thought he was a nice old man," said Peter Walker reminiscing on his 82nd birthday.