When I went to see The 3rd Floor Theatre’s performance of “Our Town” in Union City this weekend, I went with pretty high hopes.
I remembered seeing this Thornton Wilder classic when I was a junior in high school, and while the details were hazy, I remembered enjoying it as a 16-year-old. So, I knew that the play itself would be enjoyable for me, and I also knew some of the cast members, so I figured I would enjoy seeing them in the production.
What I didn’t know was that I would genuinely laugh so much or that I would end up crying to the point where I wished that I would have brought tissues.
This was my first time ever seeing a production from the The 3rd Floor Theatre, and for being a cast of people who all do this in addition to the busy lives they lead – several of the cast are even UTM students and faculty – I was thoroughly impressed with the seamless performance. It had such great acting that I forgot I was at a play in Union City, much less a play in the middle of a lime green dance studio with no props. The range of acting within this play was a wide one, and all the actors bridged that gap successfully, one minute being silly and the next speaking of strong subjects like life and death.
For those who are unfamiliar with the three-act play, it is about a small town, set in Grovers Corners, New Hampshire, in the early 1900s. The first act, called “Daily Life,” is introduced by the narrator who talks directly to the audience, telling them about the layout of the town and the people who live in it. The second act, “Love & Marriage,” takes place a few years later, showing the love story and wedding of two characters within the town, Emily and George. The third act, “Death and Eternity,” takes place nine years later and shows the death of Emily, in which she joins other dead town members and must face the fact that she has to let go of her past life.
This last act, which easily is the best and most influential part of the play, shows Emily looking back on her life when she was 12 years old, watching herself on her birthday and watching her mother and father take part in the normalcy that was their life. As she watches them, she becomes emotional, screaming at them to look at each other more, to soak up the moment. Then, after returning once again to the graveyard, she asks the narrator, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it, every, every minute?”
The idea behind that question is precisely why I enjoyed this play so much this weekend and why I enjoyed it five years ago, because this well-written and humorous play not only entertains, but in the end, has a strong thesis – are we truly living our moments and seeing what is eternal, or are we letting the repetition of our days dull the moments into simple motions?
I think the narrator says it best at the beginning of the third act.
“We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars. Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”
The mix of that message with the totally relatable bits of humor associated with living in a small town made this play enjoyable for those who happened to see it in Union City this weekend. For such a deeply moving, yet deeply funny play, I found that The 3rd Floor Theatre did a fantastic job of portraying what Wilder intended, an entertaining play with a strong message.
