On our first day of rehearsals our director talked for a bit
about the themes of Our Town. He asked: “Why Our Town?” That is, why
should a well-established professional theater company produce a play that just
about every American reads in high school? 
His answer was simply: “Why Hamlet?”  He didn’t have to say much more.  We all understood: it is a dramatic classic, always
worthy of production.

     One of the
things that makes it a classic is, he said, the way in which it shows us how
time and eternity work within the details of everyday life.  We need not go far in search of great
achievements and significance because they are right there before us is our
family relationships, our movement through the seasons of life, our quotidian
existence.  As he spoke these words, and
as we then read through the play, various resonances with Taoism and Confucianism
came to mind.

     First, on the
eternal in the everyday, this excerpt of Tao
Te Ching 63 is apt:

The complex affairs of all beneath
heaven are there in simplicity, and the vast affairs of all beneath
heaven are there in the minute.

That’s why a sage never bothers with
vastness and so becomes utterly vast.

    The complex is to be found in the simple, the
vast in the minute.  This is a central
theme in Our Town. The persons and families move through ordinary experiences: making daily meals, going off to school or work, getting
married, having children.  There is
nothing unusual here.  Quite to the
contrary, everything is very much in and of and about the ordinary.  And in that ordinariness we come to see the
eternal, the immutable, the universal condition of humankind.  The wise person – and a certain wisdom
resides in the characters of Our Town
– doesn’t explicitly embrace the big, unanswerable questions of humanity.  The sage has no need for fancy theories or explanations.  He or she doesn’t really look for them
because meaning and significance are rooted in the minute events of daily
life.  And it is in that unassuming
manner that the Webbs and the Gibbses become “utterly vast.”

(this gets a bit long, so continue after the jump):

     
Elsewhere Taoism
tells us that we could also reverse the dynamic: not only is the complex to be
found in the simple, but the simple is to be found in the complex.  Nothing terribly complex emerges in the
narrative of the play.  Perhaps my
character, Professor Willard, comes closest. 
He is described in one edition as a “rural savant.”  He uses extravagant, unnecessary language, to
the point of absurdity.  It seems that
his purpose is to complexify the rather simple question of defining the
town.  But he comes and goes, with no
real effect on anyone.  He has his moment
and then he, too, sinks back into the inescapable rhythms of life. His complexity
is just another minute element of the play, absorbed into what is ultimately
its simplicity. 

       As we read
through the play another Taoist image jumped out at me.  Here is a short speech by Mr. Webb in the
first act (pp. 19-20 in the Samuel French edition):

  Artistic
Lady (from the audience).   Mr.Webb, is
there any culture of love of  beauty in – Grover’s Corners?     

Mr. Webb. (smiling)  Well, ma’am,
there ain’t much – not in the sense you
mean.  Come to think of it, there’s some
girls that play the piano over at the High
School Commencement; but they ain’t happy about it.  No, ma’am, there isn’t much culture; but maybe this is the place to tell you
that we’ve got a lot  of
pleasures of a kind here: we like the sun comin’ up over the mountain in the morning, and we all notice a good deal
about the birds.   We pay a lot of  attention to them.  And we
watch the change of the seasons: yes, everybody knows about them.  But
those other things – you’re right ma’am – there ain’t  much.  Robinson
Crusoe and the Bible; and Handel’s Largo,
we all know that; and Whistler’s
Mother – those are just about as far as we go.

     
Simple
pleasures.  The sun and the seasons.  The birds. 
Clearly, there is a Taoist ring to this passage.  We don’t really need much in the way of
humanly created diversions, even if they are beautiful, because we find enough
to appreciate in the unfolding of nature around us.  And the reference to, and emphasis placed on,
the birds, brought this line from Chuang Tzu to mind:

People think we’re different from the baby
birds cheeping, but are we saying any more
than they are?

     
That line is part of Chuang Tzu’s critique of language and logic, where
he suggests that neither has the capacity to capture the fullness of Way, which
is something like the totality of all things expressing themselves
simultaneously.  We can’t know Way.  It cannot be rendered into words.  Our own human creations – “culture” – cannot
approach its vastness and splendor.  We
might think that we can do or say something significant, but we really
can’t.  Our words, our culture, is
nothing more than baby birds cheeping. 
So, Mr. Webb is right, in a Taoist sort of way: we should look to the
birds to learn something of Way, to see what is possible and beautiful in the
word.

     There are
Confucian ideas in Our Town as
well.  One comes in Act Two, when Mr. and
Mrs. Webb are talking to their son-in-law-to-be George Gibbs about the custom
of the groom not seeing the bride on their wedding day (p. 46):

George.
(Laughing)  Mr. Webb, you don’t believe in that superstition, do  you?

Mr.
Webb.  There’s a lot of common-sense in
superstitions, George.

Mrs.
Webb.  (Pouring coffee for him) Millions
have folla’d it, George, and don’t
you be the first to fly in the face of custom.

     The Master
himself could not have said it better: don’t fly in the face of custom.  For Confucius, carrying forward the tried and
true social practices of the past is the primary means of achieving moral
accomplishment in the present.  It is all
about “Ritual,” – li. Of course, the word "Ritual" has a formulaic
and stultifying connotation in contemporary English.  That is not what Confucius meant.  His purpose in emphasizing the best ethical
practices of the past was to focus attention on moral action now.  One did not have to mindlessly mimic the
past, but one should take it into careful consideration when thinking about
proper behavior.  Custom should not
be cast aside or taken lightly.      

     Perhaps the
primary element of Ritual for Confucius is respect for and obedience to
parents, something that the Webbs and the Gibbses would likely also
embrace.  Customary deference to parents
is the crux of moral action and social order, as Analects 1.2 tells us:

Master
Yu said: “It’s honoring parents and elders that makes people human.  Then they rarely turn against authority.  And if people don’t turn against  authority, they never rise up and
pitch the country into chaos.

“The noble-minded
cultivate roots.  When roots are secure,
the Way is born.  To honor parents and elders – isn’t that the
root of Humanity?”

     The Confucian Way is
not quite the same as the Taoist
Way. 
Confucians have an ideal of social order, emanating from the cultivation
of our closest loving relationships, that produces, ultimately, a humane and
stable world.  The Taoist Way is more naturalist and untamed
and open-ended.  The two conceptions
overlap, especially in their respect of nature and acceptance of a cosmic fate
that can shape human circumstances, but the Confucian view places more
responsibility on human beings to think about and enact proper behavior.  The good citizens of Grover’s Corners would
find something familiar and correct in that Confucian sensibility.  They would agree that to honor parents and
elders is the root of Humanity.

     The Stage
Manager also flashes a bit of a Confucian philosophy when, in Act Two (p. 58),
he narrates the wedding scene:

…And don’t
forget the other witnesses at this wedding: the ancestors.  Millions of them.   Most of them set out to live two-by-two.  Millions of them…

     Confucius,
when telling us what his work is about, also invokes the ancestors in Analects 7.1: 

The Master said: “Transmitting insight, by
never creating insight, standing by my words
and devoted to the ancestors: perhaps I’m a little like that old sage, P’eng.

     But the
Stage Manager ultimately brings us back to Taoism.  In Act Three, as he describes the cemetery
(pp. 67-68), he says:

 …Yes, an
awful lot of sorrow has sort of quieted down up here.  People just wild with grief have brought their relatives up to this hill –
and then times – sunny days –  rainy days
– snow – We all know how it is.  A lot of
thoughts come up here, night
and day, but there’s no post office – Now there are some things we all know but we don’t take’m out and look at’m very
often.  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 letting go of that
fact.  There’s something way down deep
that’s eternal about every human being…

         Something
is eternal.  He can’t quite describe it
but it doesn’t seem transcendent.  The
eternal is not way out there somewhere, beyond the human realm.  No, it is deep down inside of every human
being. The eternal is immanent, it’s
right here in us and with us.  And that’s
a Taoist idea (it’s also consistent with Confucius, but he, famously, did not
talk much about metaphysics and the after-life and such; they are among the
“silences” of Confucius).  The more I
think about this, the more surprised I am. 
At first, when I heard these lines, I figured that Wilder, the
playwright, was working toward a Christian heaven, a transcendent place of
redemption.  The various Christian hymns
sprinkled through the text suggest as much. 
But the passage above seems to be saying something else.  The eternal “has to do with human beings,”
not gods or, even, God.  It is, as Chuang
Tzu would tell us (87), about Way, that ineffable totality and completeness of
all things unfolding together:

 Way has its own nature and its own
reliability: it does nothing and it has no form.   It
can be passed on, but never received and held. 
You can master it, but you can’t  see
it.  Its own source, its own root – it
was there before heaven and earth, firm and
constant from ancient times.  It makes
gods and demons sacred, gives birth to heaven
and earth. It’s above the absolute pole, but is not high.  It’s below the six directions, but is not deep.  It predates the birth of heaven and earth,
but is not  ancient.  it precedes high antiquity, but is not old.

         Natural
processes – birth and death – are eternal. 
They are not the product of heaven or gods; rather they precede and
define heaven and gods.  And, perhaps
most importantly, eternity is not out there in the great beyond.  It is right here with us.  Way is not high and is not deep and is not
old.  It is immediate and present in all
we do.

       Emily comes
to see this upon her death.  She say
(74): “…Oh, Mother Gibbs, I never realized before how troubled and how – how in
the dark live persons are.”  We are in
the dark because we do not realize that eternity is immanent, that Way is
present in the minutiae of our daily lives. 
We strive for more and more, create great expectations that blind us to
the simple reality of the fullness of the everyday.  Emily, after she returns to the living for a
moment, says this even more directly (83):

Emily….Do
any human beings ever realize life while they live it – every, every minute?

Stage
Manager. (Quietly)  No – Saints and poets
maybe – they do some.

             A Taoist
would say that it is a sage who comes to realize life while it is lived.  And there are very few sages out there.

             Some might
find a certain sadness and frustration here: we are doomed to be ignorant of
where meaning ultimately is to be found. 
And in the play Stimson, toward the very end (84) seems to echo that
idea when he comments upon Emily’s attempt to return to life:

 Stimson.  (With mounting violence)  Yes. 
Now you know.  Now you know: that’s what is was to be
alive.  To move about in a cloud of
ignorance; to go up and down
trampling on the feeling of those – of those about you.  To spend and
waste time as though you had a million years. 
To be always at the mercy of  one
self-centered passion, or another.  Now
you know – that’s the “happy” existence
you wanted to go back to.  Ignorance and
blindness!

        Chuang Tzu
says something rather similar (20):

 Once
we happen into the form of this body, we cannot forget it.  And so it is
that we wait out the end.  Grappling and
tangling with things, we rush headlong
toward the end, and there’s no stopping it. 
It’s sad, isn’t it?  We   slave our lives away and never get anywhere,
work ourselves ragged and never find
our way home.  How could it be anything
but sorrow?  People can talk about  never dying, but what good is
that?  This form we have soon becomes
others, and the mind vanishes
with it.  How could it be called anything
but great sorrow?  Life is total confusion.  Or is it
that I’m the only one who’s confused?

        But Wilder
does not leave it there, nor does Chuang Tzu. 
In Our Town, Mrs. Gibbs
immediately retorts to Stimson: “That ain’t the whole truth and you know it,
Simon Stimson.  (Resuming her
tranquility)  Emily, look at that star.  I forget it’s name.”  And after a last interaction between the
living and the dead, the Stage Manager turns our attention again to the stars
(85):

 
“…There are
the stars – doing their old, old criss-cross in the skies.(Continues)  Scholars haven’t
settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there.  Just chalk – or fire.  Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something
of itself.  The strain’s so great that
every sixteen hours everybody
lies down and gets a rest.  (Clock strikes.  He reaches L.) Hm – Eleven o’clock in Grover’s Corners.  (He winds his watch)  Everybody’s resting
in Grover’s Corners.  Tomorrow’s going to
be another day.  You get a good rest too. 
Good night.  (Exits down L.)

        Life goes
on.  The stars turn in the sky.  Tomorrow is another day.  Way, for a Taoist, continues to unfold in its
wondrous and eternal and simple ways. 
Chuang Tzu says as much (75):

       Birth and death, living and dead, failure
and success, poverty and wealth, honor and
dishonor, slander and praise, hunger and thirst, hot and cold – such are the  transformations of this world, the
movements of its inevitable nature.  They
keep  vanishing into one
another before our very eyes, day in and day out, but we’ll  never calibrate what drives them.  So how can they steal our serenity, how can they plunder the spirit’s
treasure-house?  If you let them move
together, at ease and serene,
you’ll never lose your joy.  And if you
do this without pause, day in and
day out, you’ll invest all things with spring…

             Ultimately
there can be joy.  There can be the
serenity and tranquility that Mrs. Gibbs finds. 
And that might be possible for us while we live.  We only have to listen to what the ancient
texts have to tell us, a message that is reiterated, beautifully, in Our Town.