Our Town, the MacDowell Colony, and the Art of Civic Mediation

In 2011, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the major federal funding body for culture in the US, launched a new set of "creative placemaking" grants. These grants support public–private partnerships for organizations that promise to use art to strengthen "the social, physical, and economic characters of their neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions." The program, which gave $6.575 million to 51 communities in 34 states, is called "Our Town," after Thornton Wilder's 1938 play ("NEA Chairman"). This choice by cultural administrators signals something about the play that scholars have yet to reckon with. Eighty years after its Broadway opening, Our Town regularly pops up in the cultural sphere when cultural actors seek to align their work with community service.

Our Town has long been a staple of community and high school theater. There are practical reasons for this. The first stage direction reads "No curtain. No scenery" (Wilder 149). Cash-strapped schools or local theaters don't need expensive costumes or sets to stage the play, only a couple of folding chairs. The Stage Manager character, Wilder's theatrical innovation, tells the audience what's happening and how to feel about it, relieving some of the pressure from the propless actors.¹ The universal subjects of the play—daily life, growing up, marriage, death—invite identification and sentiment. And using nonprofessional actors helps companies support their claims that the arts are by the people, for the people.

Although set in the fictional New Hampshire town of Grover's Corners at the turn of the twentieth century, Our Town is nothing if not flexible. A recent production in Miami featured characters speaking in English, Spanish, and Creole; another by Deaf West Theater in Pasadena integrates Wilder's script with American Sign Language. A 2002 documentary—OT: Our Town, directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy—tells the story of teachers who stage Our Town in Compton, a predominantly black and Latino neighborhood in Los Angeles.

Our Town's flexibility makes it an effective vehicle for incorporating local needs into art. In the wake of the May 2017 terrorist attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, the Royal Exchange Theatre (RET) perhaps unexpectedly staged Our Town as an act of civic pride and healing. The suicide bombing, perpetrated by a 22-year old British Sunni Muslim man of Libyan descent, killed 22 people and injured 119. It also resulted in a surge in anti-Muslim hate crimes in the Manchester area. As a response, the RET cast Youssef Kerkour, a British-Moroccan actor who lives in New York, as the Stage Manager. In an interview with the New York Times, Kerkour commented on the importance of his highly visible role: "In the context of what's just happened, I'm overjoyed to say, 'Yes, I'm a Muslim. Come watch the play. Hear my American accent. Look at my beard. We have more in common than we have differences'" (qtd. in Trueman). St. Ann's Square, where the theater sits, became a makeshift memorial for the bombings. Artistic Director Sarah Frankcom recalled that Our Town captured the feeling in the city at the time: "We suddenly all went, 'Oh, that's why we have town squares, isn't it?' It wasn't about looking at flowers, but about needing to be together" (qtd. in Trueman). Our Town represented both an occasion for public mourning and a show of inclusion. It also allowed the company to assimilate local nonprofessional actors seamlessly into a production—a vital factor when government arts funding is tied to community engagement.

Our Town facilitates the relationship between arts organizations and communities in at least four ways. On a basic level, it gives towns and cities a script for representing themselves in terms that are legible across space, time, and human difference. Even as it locates community in a knowable world of face-to-face relationships and civic institutions, it furnishes a structure for recognition among communities of different scales. As the Manchester performance demonstrates, Our Town also helps communities manage—aesthetically, perhaps politically—social differences perceived...