The Stage Manager is a cryptic creation; the most basic stuff about him can’t be immediately discerned. Does he live in the town? Apparently. He knows the other characters onstage and chats with them freely. Yet he also knows that everything that’s happening around him is theater. He tells the audience so right away, in the first lines of his opening monologue. Wilder even left blank spaces in the script for the actor to fill in, so that each production of Our Town could be personalized for the community performing it. When the play opened in Anchorage, for example, Brink’s Stage Manager was
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Clever conceit
