Rating: 
Summary: In Its Day
Review: There was a time when the simpler things of life mattered more than they seem to today. Or maybe I've got that wrong. In earlier days they simply didn't have the distractions we do today and that made the simpler things seem more important then. Today, with all the input we have to deal with every day and our lives compounded by every sort of temptation that we no longer are criticized for not resisting, things are different. But does that make the smaller and simpler things of life any less important? No, of course not. It just means we don't dwell on them like we used to. Our attention spans are necessarily shorter. So what does that do for this play? For me it's more like a window on the past. Its relevance for today at first seems less, but just maybe there's something here for today. In all our busyness it just might help to, as the phrase goes, take time to smell the flowers along the way. The book itself is well prepared. It's an oversize paperback and the characters and stage business are easy to follow given the type font used and the spacing allowed between lines. The print is uniform and the paper an off white that keeps contrast down and reflections away. A nice publication of a play that is an American standard and Pulitzer Prize winner, from an author who, according to the notes in the book, was somewhat out of his own time even as he wrote this.
Rating: 
Summary: Still a classic!
Review: ... I have recently begun spending time rereading literature that I first read when in school. The question that I posed to myself was whether the "classics" that I had to read in High School or College still met the test of time. I am very pleased that my rereading of Our Town not only met, but exceeded my expectations and memory. In my opinion, plays are the most unread form of literature in America. We are fed a diet of fiction and history, even poetry is more often read and studied than plays. After rereading Our Town it is easy to understand why Wilder won a Pulitzer Prize for this work. Short, only 112 pages, spartan in its set design it left all for the imagination.
This is a play that can be read in a short period of time, and while it seems so simple and easy in Act I, by the end the true depth of meaning has hit the reader. All of the action takes place in the matter of 12 years, almost a generation, and the changes that have taken place in those mere 112 pages have brought us to character involvement, life, birth, death and deeper meanings of why we are here on Earth. Our Town means so much more to me than it did when in school, most likely because I, like the play, have aged and not am at a period of my own life where I can look back and see similar fact patterns. Add to that the maturity of age and Our Town is Still a Classic, a play to be read in school, performed on stage and reread every now and then as we age. In doing that we are able to better understand the characters, the emotions and the fact that there is no set or scenery in our mind and can envision the play however and on whatever level the reader so desires.
Rating:
Summary: MY FAVORITE
Review: This is my favorite book. I love the idea of Emily seeing everyone after she dies and wanting to go back. I usually don't like the to read plays, but this one is an exception. It is really a great book and should be read by everyone
Rating:
Summary: The most beautiful thing I have ever read
Review: I love this play. If there is any piece of literature that I wish that I had written, this is it. The play is broken into three acts - the three phases of life. A birth. A wedding. A funeral. Three things that everyone experiences at some point in their lives. With his unique narrative style, Thornton Wilder weaves a story about life in a small town at the turn of the century. Everything is simple, but so wonderfully complicated. The first time I read this play I wept for an hour. I've never read anything outside of the Bible that better sums up the human condition. Anyone with even a shred of humanity will love this play.
Rating: 
Summary: Not What You Thought
Review: If you can distinguish sentiment from sentimentality, and don't flee from both for fear of not knowing the difference, try this play. Wilder's novels and plays are modern, but backward-looking. And they are "romantic." The whole 20th century swerved determinedly away from romanticism, and especially from any whiff of sentimentality. Sentimentality is a shoddy imitation of a fine human feeling. But in the determined avoidance of mush, many writers have abandoned valid emotions and high human feelings. Wilder was one of the few authors in the last century who attempted that dangerous ground, who walked toward sentiment with open eyes. And he did so with a craft as solid as Ezra Pound or James Joyce, the great writers who led the swerve away from Victorian pap. In 8th grade, I didn't know any of this. The novel "The Eighth Day" is his masterpiece, weaving beautiful symphonic music out of the vaudeville of "Skin of Our Teeth." It's as hard-headed as Ayn Rand and as hopeful as a first love. Among the plays, only "Our Town" rivals it. You've probably seen "Our Town" already. Somewhere in America, every hour of every day, some high school is acting it. But you haven't seen it. . It requires the very long view, the ability to swallow the tragedies and still love the fact of life, the texture of it. Wilder served in both World Wars; he suffered an ambivalent sexuality in an America that was intolerant of such things. And he wrote not with the grim "cold eye" of the mature Yeats (who never went to war), but with a warm, loving affirmation of the beauty in the big messy world.
Rating:
Summary: Thornton Wilder's paean to small town American life
Review: The "New York Times" review by brooks Atkinson of of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" in 1938 called it "a hauntingly beautiful play." The play is considered a classic portrayal of small-town American life, set in the town of Grover's Corner, New Hampshire. We follow the lives of George Gibbs, a doctor's son, and Emily Webb, the daughter of the newspaper editor, through their courtship, marriage, and Emily's death in childbirth. However, the style of "Our Town" is sometimes considered more striking than the substance because of its lack of props and scenery. The play features a narrator, the Stage Manager, who sits at the side of the unadorned stage and explains the action to the audience.
It is hard to believe that Wilder's nonrealistic stagecraft was a subject of concern to anyone then or now; I would have thought Shakespeare put that concern to rest in the prologue to "Henry V." I would have said Wilder was simply finding a way to make the setting and scenery irrelevant to his story he was trying to tell, although I also suspect he was trying to set up the impact of the end of the play which takes place in the town's graveyard as Emily and the other characters describe the peace of life after death. Wilder's makes it clear he is trying to convey the simple sanctity of everyday life, a theme that is certainly found in Wilder's novel "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" (1927), which looked at the lives of five persons who died in the collapse of a bridge in Peru in the 18th century. The key exchange comes between Emily, who asks "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?--every, every minute?" "No," the Stage Manager responds, "The saints and poets, maybe--they do some." Obviously that is the lesson Wilder wants to impart to his audiences and the big question today is whether the frantic change in the pace of life we see a century later has made Wilder's point incomprehensible to most American audience. "Our Town" is an important American drama, not because it was considered innovative or because it won the Pulitzer Prize, but because it represents the last gasp of American lyricism in the 20th century. World War I transmuted the Realists into the Modernists, writers like Hemingway and Steinbeck, whose response to the horrors of modern warfare was to elevate the subjects of literature to loftier grounds. In a world where men die or are maimed for life by poisonous gas, bombs dropped from airplanes, or machine guns, a new significance of meaning needs to be created. By such standards "Our Town" pales in comparison to the works of Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. But if you put Wilder's play in historical and cultural perspective, then I think its greatness remains assured.
Rating:
Summary: Special play
Review: I have never read a similar play like this before. The thing which makes the book different from other traditional plays isthe fact that Our Twon is being directed by the stage director who breaks up the ficticious performance of the actors. And in those intervenitons the stage manager speaks or explains what is about to happen on the stage. Or sometimes the actors play people in the audience, make suggestions and try to influence the running of the play directed by the stage manager.
There are always actions, and how I can remember, there are never scenes without an intersting action or without an overall theme, like birth or marriage or death. So it turns out to be quite universal. It's varied and never boring.
Rating: 
Summary: "Our Town" is nothing special
Review: Let me start off by saying that I love plays and was intrigued to hear that this play did not use props or sets. Thornton Wilder purposely underdeveloped the characters and made it lacking, but this was beyond underdevelopment and lacking -- why bother writing a play? The acts are very short, emotionless, and unmemorable and I hated the characters, because they were uncaring. Why "Our Town" is required reading for high school and America's favorite drama, I do not know - I didn't get anything out of it besides boredom and confusion. I do not recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting message
Review: I can`t say that I find it an outstanding play, but I don`t find it bad either. It deals with an ordinary little town in the USA at the beginning of the last century. It describes everyday life of normal people, their pleasures and their sorrows. This ordinary touch of the play makes it a bit difficult to see a message in the book at first sight. But at the end of the play in the III Act I`ve found a interesting message: We spend and waste our time as though we had a million years to live and don't realize what life really is like!
Rating:
Summary: "Normal" life
Review: I think that Thornton Wilder is a good playwright who understands how to write a story that deals with almost every common people. I think it's a little bit boring when the stage manager talks about the town on the stage. It's o.k. when he said two, three sentences but not page after page, like in act one. Wilder divides the play into three parts (daily life and birth, love and marriage, and death) and I think that these three stages in life are the most important factors in one's biography to make this whole play interesting. He discribes normal life very well.
The 3rd act, where the dead talk together, is very special and I think that is one of the most interesting parts. I like it very much because I think it's something different to talk about. Why don't the living people heed their message?
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