our town

Our little play-reading group has just finished Our Town by Thornton Wilder. The third act is sad and poignant, but at least it lacks the injustice of the ending of The Crucible. We need a light comedy next. How about The Importance of Being Earnest, a play criticized when it was new for not being about anything of significance? Perfect!

Our Town is about things of significance, and one of the lessons of the third act is something I learned independently. When I was an adolescent I thought about the fact that anything resembling a normal lifespan would take my life through the year 2000, then still over 25 years away. Ooh, how strange and exotic. And I wondered, what would I know in the year 2000 that I would want my adolescent self to understand?

When it came to the year 2000, I remembered thinking that, and I cast my mind over what message I would want to send back in time. And I decided that it would convey something that my adolescent self would know intellectually, but that doesn't really hit you until it happens.

And that is, the number of people who would have died.