When my husband proposed the book Tom Lake for us to listen to on a recent road trip to visit our baby granddaughter, I readily agreed. I wasn’t familiar with the story, but I am a fan of Ann Patchett’s writing. I didn’t know that this book would zing through my heartstrings and reverberate down to my toes.
The plot of Tom Lake includes several productions of Thornton Wilder’s reliable, much-performed play “Our Town.” The first-person narrator of Tom Lake is a woman who played the leading role of Emily three times—in community theater when she was in high school, in college and with a summer stock theater called Tom Lake. She missed out on a chance to be Emily on Broadway. She is much older now, a partner in a long happy marriage with three grown children, having traded a career as a professional actress for a quieter family life.
As I listened, recurring jolts of recognition in this fictional woman’s history struck me: I played Emily in college; I’m in a long happy marriage; I have four grown children; I pursued an acting career only briefly after graduation, preferring the security of motherhood to the itinerancy of the stage. The book’s narrator owns and works a cherry farm in Michigan, so the weirdly familiar parallels ended there. But she spoke my language. She shook loose a lot of memories. I had to keep stopping the book to tell my husband my own “Our Town” tales because he hadn’t seen my portrayal of Emily back in the last century.
Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” first appeared on Broadway in 1938. It won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. I imagine it was cutting-edge theater in its day: The staging is minimal and stark, with a few tables and chairs as scenery, and all the props are pantomimed. It’s a slice-of-life glimpse into an early 1900s town in New Hampshire called Grover’s Corners, a stand-in for Everytown USA. The main message of “Our Town” is that we humans do not appreciate life as we are living it in the present tense. When we finally do learn to value the ephemeral gift of a normal day, it is often too late.
As Tom Lake’s narrator notes, most of us who have played Emily onstage were too young to plunge into the depth of the role. In the three acts of “Our Town,” Emily is first a schoolgirl—I well remember the painful binding of my 21-year-old breasts and the higher pitch of my voice that the first act necessitated—then a bride, then a young mother who dies in childbirth, so actresses age out of the part pretty early in their careers. Maybe the role of Emily requires an old soul in a young body.
In the last act, Emily is newly dead, but she is given the chance to relive a typical day in her earthly life by the Stage Manager, a pipe-smoking, folksy fellow who is the mystical, omnipotent narrator of “Our Town.” Emily chooses the day of her 12th birthday.
It turns out to be a bad idea.
Fun fact: When I was a theater major in college, my student employment was as the janitor of the theater where I performed in various plays for four years. During the run of “Our Town,” when I reported for work in the morning, I enjoyed a little spark of triumph every time I swept up the used crumpled tissues some of the audience members had left behind the night before. They represented victory, the leavings of the faint sniffles I could hear during the tearjerker third act, at least if the performance was going well. But now I realize that the people who fished those tissues out of their pockets or purses weren’t crying because I was so convincing as Emily. I hadn’t made them cry with my brilliance. They were crying for the bittersweet reminder of their own moms, their own dads, their own terrible losses. As a 21-year-old, I didn’t get that.
Good theater draws us into its few hours of seeming reality, but it is most effective when it speaks to our lived reality.
And how could I have? At 21, nostalgia and regret were emotions that I played onstage, not times or trials I’d lived through. I had no patience for nostalgia and regret back then. I was just acting. The line that triggers Emily’s climactic emotional collapse comes from her father, Mr. Webb: “Where’s my girl? Where’s my birthday girl?” He calls it from offstage to a 12-year-old daughter, and the now-dead adult Emily can’t bear the pure sweetness of the moment that she failed to appreciate when she was in that moment. She flees back to her place in the graveyard.
After my dad saw our college production of “Our Town,” that line stuck with him so firmly that he’d repeat it to me every year on my birthday, either in person or over the phone, for decades. After he died, I called my friend from college who had played the role of Emily’s father and asked him to say it to me, just once. It wasn’t the same.
If I were to attend a performance of “Our Town” tomorrow, I know that whoever was playing Emily would hear me sniffling even before Mr. Webb called out, “Where’s my girl? Where’s my birthday girl?” I hope the actors will feel the secret satisfaction that I once felt. But now I understand the tears: When your dad dies, you know you’ll never be his birthday girl again. How you’d love to hear him say those lines to you just one more time because you know you didn’t fully appreciate the blanket of love that enfolded you long ago. It makes you weep.
I’ve learned that nostalgia and regret come with age. But so do grace and compassion, if we allow them in. All these qualities coexist in our hearts, even if we never identify them or verbalize them. They form us. Good theater draws us into its few hours of seeming reality, but it is most effective when it speaks to our lived reality.
A lot more happens in Tom Lake than the memory of some past productions of “Our Town,” but the play’s lesson weaves itself throughout the novel. Ann Patchett has written a luscious book, as ripe as the cherries on the family farm. Tom Lake reminds me of the way a friend of mine describes her philosophy of life: “This ain’t no dress rehearsal,” my friend says. She is exactly right. This day, this hour, this unimportant moment, this grant of life from God, is everything.
At the end of “Our Town,” after a crushed Emily returns to her chair in the cemetery, she asks, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?”
“No,” replies the Stage Manager.
Then he says, after a pause, “The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.”
The saints and the poets, yes, and maybe, just maybe, with the grace of God and the benefit of hindsight and the gift of years, us.
