Justin/ Jason/ Rachael - Theme - Seminar

[iain melville]

Give it a whirl!

[Jason Kwan]

Themes
1. The Transience of Human Life
- Ex1. The Stage Manager misjudges the time
Demonstrates that sometimes even the timekeeper himself falls victim
to the passage of time.
- Ex2. Value of routine daily activity in Act 1 – Daily Life
Wilder juxtaposes this flurry of everyday activity with the
characters’ inattentiveness to it.
- Ex3. Medium of theater
Wilder intends to make ordinary lives and actions seem extraordinary.

2. Blindness and ignorance
Wilder portrays the daily lives or its inhabitants and how
unappreciative they are of the impact these events have on their
personalities.

3. The Artificiality of the Theater
- Ex1. Wilder employs a scenario of daily routine, such as “a milkman
delivers milk” and “Joe Crowell delivers newspaper everyday”
Wilder undermines this appearance of reality by filling the play with
devices (slice of real life) that emphasize the artificiality of
theater.
- Ex2. The Stage Manager manipulates the passage of time,
incorporating flashbacks that take the audience and characters back to
significant

Useful phases and collocation
- Throughout Our Town, Wilder illustrates the theme (……..)
- Wilder juxtaposes (…………….) with the characters’ inattentiveness to
it.
- The playwright impels the audience (………….)
- Rites of passage
- Passage of time
- Trivial acts of life
- Blindness and ignorance

Key Quotes
- The morning star always gets wonderful bright the minute
before it has to go, -doesn’t it?” (I. 4)
- That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of
ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those…of
those about you…Now you know – that’s the happy existence you wanted
to go back to. Ignorance and blindness (III.209).

- EMILY: Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? –
every, every minute? STAGE MANAGER: No. (III.108)
- “They don’t’ understand, do they?” (III. 111)

Effect on audience
- The audience learns, as Emily does, that there is a limit to how
many moments any one person has.

- Wilder wants the audience to see that life is a cycle and that every
bit of time in life should be well-spent, for one does not know when
his /her death is.

- The playwright impels the audience toward an understanding and
appreciation of the transience of human life.

- The play does not suggest that all human life is strictly cyclical,
just that it is overwhelmingly so.

- Wilder constantly reminds the audience that they are in a theater
watching actors perform in a make-believe world.

On Mar 12, 12:48 am, iain melville <elliv...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Give it a whirl!