Overall, I think that Our Town is a nice, quickly paced, and interesting play. I say this due to the fact that Emily’s life is essentially compressed into only about 80 pages of writing, whilst talking about other characters and events that happened in the play. Because of this, the play only briefly touches on details about each of the character’s lives because the book is so short. Personally, I don’t really like the fast pace in this book. I prefer to have lots of extra descriptions and gazes into each of the character’s lives before getting into a play. When something happens in the play, I have those extra descriptions about each of the characters, so I can go “Maybe this character did this because of [fill in the blank]”. Besides the pace, I enjoyed the play. Something that stuck out to me in the play is that Emily was under the impression that George had almost distanced himself from her, indirectly, because she believed he got too busy with baseball and other people to spend time with her. I think that later in the play, George ultimately tried to change for Emily, by not going to Agriculture School and instead taking over his Uncle’s farm so he could stay close to Grover’s Corners, to make it easier to spend time with Emily. It was sad to hear that she died from childbirth near the end of the play after getting married to George.
Another element that stuck out to me was the improvisation used in the video of the play. The props used in the video were minimal, and most things in the video were mimed rather than being an actual prop. I haven’t really seen this often, so it was interesting to see how realistic they made the props since they weren’t even there. For some remarks about Emily, I think that she was a genuine, kind character in the play. Reason being, she really cared about George, and I think she showed this when they had that talk in the middle of the play. When she shared her concerns to George, it showed she cared because most people wouldn’t do that unless they did. If she hadn’t cared about George, she wouldn’t have voiced her concerns, and George wouldn’t be able to accommodate those concerns.
Overall, ‘Our Town‘ is a nicely written, eye-opening piece. It is very well done.