This Is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, a Voice That Held It Together

by Jon Mooallem

when the Stage Manager character appears and speaks the first lines right at the audience: “This play is called Our Town. It was written by Thornton Wilder”—and so on. But even beyond his immediate breaking of the fourth wall, there’s something disruptive and irreconcilably weird about the Stage Manager as a narrator. He interacts with the characters onstage as easily as he does with the audience, but doesn’t seem to be wholly part of either world, or situated in any specific time. Instead, we discover, he’s endowed with a kind of breezy omniscience about the past and future, able to see the full sweep of time around each present moment that unfolds onstage. Just minutes into Act I, for example, as the sun rises on the small town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, and a character named Dr. Gibbs returns home to his wife from an overnight house call, the Stage Manager interrupts the couple’s conversation to explain to the audience how and when each of those characters in the kitchen behind him will eventually die. “Mrs. Gibbs died first,” he says.