[johndhi]

Spurred by a line in Vonnegut that 'Our Town is the best piece of writing in history," I recently read Wilder's three most famous plays. They're all fantastic. Our Town is indeed my favorite. I haven't seen it produced - weirdly plays usually don't do it for me - but the joy of the unusual format and fhf remarkable third act really brought out the feels for me. Recommended reading!

[eszed]

You might enjoy reading "Spoon River Anthology", by Edgar Lee Masters, which was one of the inspirations for Our Town. It's a cycle of short free-verse testimonies "spoken" by the dead in a small town cemetery. Reading them builds up a sort of kaleidoscopic portrait of everything that went on there over the course of a generation or two. Each of the characters only speak once, like a epitaph, so all the way through you're putting pieces together, and by the end you're really anticipating what the key figures in a couple of the sub-plots will say. It's really cool!

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1280

[dmccarty2829]

the only place I have ever seen a Thornton Wilder play is in student theatre in high school