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

by Jon Mooallem

In Our Town, he wanted to bring that way of seeing to the stage. The Stage Manager explains this outright toward the end of Act I. A new bank is being built in Grover’s Corners, he notes, and they’re sealing a time capsule in its cornerstone to be dug up a thousand years in the future. The Stage Manager expects that they’ll put a copy of the Constitution and a Bible in the time capsule, but worries those documents won’t reveal the texture of ordinary life in town—“real life,” he says, like the stories we’ve been watching onstage. After all, the Stage Manager explains, “Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about ’m is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts…and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney—same as here.” So the Stage Manager decides he’ll put a copy of this play in the time capsule, too: Our Town by Thornton Wilder.