Suddenly, the Stage Manager starts talking to those people a thousand years in the future. His logic here is convoluted, but sound: knowing that he is a character in Wilder’s play himself, he knows that what he says to us, in the theater, will be preserved in the script for those future humans to read. “So—people a thousand years from now,” he says. “This is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.”
