"Our Town", presented by Jed Harris, written by Thornton Wilder, and starring Frank Craven, vitalizes the vital statistics of Grovers Corners, a mythical village in New Hampshire. Mr. Craven, called the Stage Manager, saunters about leisurely arranging and rearranging the few odd pieces of furniture serving as scenery, takes two parts in the play, apologizes for the coarseness of the characters' remarks, makes running comments to fill in the gaps in the action while leaning nonchalantly on one side of the portal of the stage and puffing, away at his pipe, thanks the actors for the episodes they have presented, and counteracts with the dryness of his observations the sweetness and the sentimentality of the play.

The first act is an introduction to Grovers Corners and its inhabitants. During the course of it Mr. Craven calls upon a little squirrel of a professor to give the geological history and other recondite data of the town, and also upon a prominent citizen to sketch in the general tenor of the place and to answer the questions of a Communist, a cultural uplift lady, and a W. C. T. U. worker, all scattered through the audience. The second act deals with love and marriage, and the third with death.

Mr. Craven, as the minister who marries the boy and girl lovers, doesn't know whether he approves of marriage or not, but in the last act the events and he become quite philosophical, and he comes forth with some decided views on death. He takes for granted a universal belief in the immortality of the soul, and then he explains that a dozen people, sitting very stiffly in chairs on the stage, are dead people in their graven, waiting for the earthly parts of themselves to pass away, and for the great metamorphosis into their eternal forms to overtake them. When the lovely heroine leaves her funeral and joins the dead, life as well as death is philosophized upon. She goes back to her family and her twelfth birthday, and there and then bewails the blindness of men and women, and their insensitivity to the great human values lying in great wealth all about them.

Just as the total lack of scenery calls for considerable Imaginative response on the part of the spectator, so the extreme sentimentality of the play and its absorption in commonplace people call for a good deal of sympathetic for bearance. The necessary imagination is very easily mustered by everyone, and most of the audience, although by no means all, find the called-for-interest and compassion forthcoming.