On September 11, 2001, Thornton Wilder was dead.  He was not available to speak to firemen in New York through a megaphone, or to call a news conference in Washington, or to read a memorial sermon at any number of services all over the world.  Thornton Wilder did not speak in 2001 because he had died in 1975, when the World Trade Center was two years old.

But somewhere in America—in dozens of places, actually—we know that Wilder did speak on that day.  We know that because on everyday somewhere in Florida, and somewhere in Arizona, and somewhere in Idaho there is a production of Our Town, and at the end of the day dozens of women playing Emily Webb look into the eyes of dozens of men playing the Stage Manager and ask,

“Do human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”

And the men all reply, “No.  The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.”

As a direct contemporary of John Steinbeck and of Langston Hughes, Wilder is often slighted by critics as being detached from the fierce social and political upheaval of his lifetime.  In particular, the ease in which Our Town slips into the routine of youth drama leads some to dismiss the work as lightweight.  There is a disappointment that Wilder wasn’t the journalistic writer that recorded the details of the struggle.  Or the activist writer who outlined the strategy for a new day.

But Wilder’s gift was instead that of an archeologist writer.  Or rather one that plants the artifacts that a future scientist will discover and appreciate and share.  In Our Town, the Stage Manager stops to ask the audience which items belong in our communal time capsule, so a people a thousand years from now will know, “this is the way we were in our growing-up, in our marrying, in our living, and in our dying.”

The art of archeology is more political than is generally supposed.

When the Nazis rose in Europe, one impulse urged resistance.  One impulse urged preservation.  In 1938, Wilder wrote Our Town as a time capsule of the American identity at a time when it was not clear that such a thing would endure.  Wilder had exercised that same instinct as a young writer peering through the smoke of World War I and the desperation of the Depression.  His first three novellas—including The Bridge of San Luis Rey—had faced the idea of death and the survival of ideas.  None of the work allowed revenge as a solution.  Wilder embraced the instinct to fight, but his fight was for something durable.

In the opening sentences of Bridge, an unthinkable tragedy occurs and the people of Lima are unified in grief and hallucination.  There are no megaphones for Brother Juniper to promise his converts retribution against gravity or destiny.  When Wilder writes “only one person did anything about it,” he is crediting Juniper with making the only constructive gesture a human can make against death.  Juniper is honoring life.

How many times have we heard this, and how many times have we believed it?

Mahatma Gandhi remarked on the lex talionis: "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and the whole world would soon be blind and toothless."  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., accepted his Nobel Peace Prize by saying, “Violence as a way of achieving justice is both impractical and immoral.  It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all.  It is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love.”

On September 11, 2001, one impulse urged resistance.  One impulse urged preservation. 

This theatre company was formed and continues to exist in the shadow of war.  In two years on this stage, we have presented politics by rabble-rousing (Woody Guthrie), by chastising (Charles Dickens), and by mocking (Dario Fo).  We have heard our whole lives that the spiral will consume us, yet there are still days when we have the impulse to follow the sloping path.

Thornton Wilder wants us to look for something more eternal than revenge.  He wants us to be braver than that.  He wants us to study ourselves for solutions:  “We all know that something is eternal,” the Stage Manager explains in Our Town.  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 losing hold of it.  There’s something way deep down that’s eternal about every human being.”

The only meaning, the only survival.