Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as a Summation of the Gurdjieff Work

Our Town is a three-act play written by American playwright Thornton Wilder in 1938. Described by Edward Albee as “the greatest American play ever written,”¹ it presents the fictional American town of Grover's Corners between 1901 and 1913 through the everyday lives of its citizens. It went on to be successful on Broadway and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and remains popular today. A new revival opened on Broadway on October 10, 2024. 

Wilder employed a metatheatrical style. The story is narrated by the Stage Manager, who also appears as several different characters. The Stage Manager establishes the story’s supernatural point of view, as the Stage Manager breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly. Unlike other Oragean writings,² Our Town presents elements of Gurdjieff’s 1,200-page science fiction novel, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, a coded esoteric text. Gurdjieff’s novel is framed as being the description of the three-brained beings of the planet Earth for the entertainment of his grandson:  

Beelzebub rebels against His Endlessness (God) and is banished to a distant Solar system (ours). He spends his exile in observation of the solar system, and of Earth and men in particular. He visits Earth six times and witnesses its life-span from just after its creation until 1922. . . . Within this narrative framework Gurdjieff gives his teaching about the degenerate state of humanity, about the cosmological Laws of Three and Seven, and about the possible ‘way’ to liberation.³ 

Similarly, Wilder’s Our Town addresses the problematic condition of mankind as modeled through the inhabitants of Grover’s Corners.  

Wilder’s play conforms to a type of writing that was formulated by the followers of A. R. Orage, the teacher of the Gurdjieff Work in New York from 1924 to 1931. Oragean writing was codified by Carl Van Vechten in his novel The Blind Bow Boy (1923). Whether novel, long poem, or drama, Oragean literary works were written using the alchemical phonetic cabala code, exhibited intentional mistakes, and at some point, contained a discourse—called a legominism— that reveals some aspect of esoteric ideas. Wilder’s play is unique in that rather than being confined to a limited explication of an idea, it summarizes the Gurdjieff Work.  

The drama opens when the Stage Manager enters. The Stage Manager’s name instructs in the phonetic solution to the code: “say anagram.” This phrase opens the entire play to being understood as a phonetically coded esoteric text. If words are treated as anagrams and are also treated as synonyms when pronounced, they may be decoded. The Stage Manager proceeds to provide an overview of Grover’s Corners. The name Grover’s Corners reads as “once over,” since Our Town is a once over of the Gurdjieff Work.  

As the initial setting of the locale, the Stage Manager mentions the Gibbs family and immediately details the deaths of Doc and Mrs Gibbs. The introduction of the theme of death mirrors the centrality of death in Beelzebub’s Tales: 

[Beelzebub’s] final message for humanity is that only through a constant memory of death, that we will die, that everyone we see or think about will also die, will we be able to find compassion and love for one another. Beelzebub suggests that consciousness of death can destroy the ego. This is necessary because the ego's tendency to hate is the cause of all men's abnormalities.⁴

The theme of death is sustained throughout the first two acts, "Daily Life" and "Love and Marriage." The title of Act 3 is “Death and Eternity.” 

May 7, 1901, begins with the entrance of routine occupations, the newsboy and the milkman. Of particular importance is Howie Newsome, the milkman, who has a cart pulled by a horse: “Gurdjieff relates the four bodies, parts or functions of man to a carriage, horse, driver and master. The carriage represents the physical body/instincts, the horse the astral body/emotions, the driver the mental body/mind and the master the causal body/I, consciousness and will”.⁵ Newsome relates that the horse is all mixed up about the route, suggesting that the connections between the parts are not in good working order. Howie Newsome’s name says, “know how,” which tells us that know how about the necessary connections is lacking. The milkman appears at the beginning of every act, and we may suppose this breakdown is the general condition of society. This breakdown is illustrated in the drama when the horse makes stops where milk is no longer wanted, and Newsome must struggle with the horse at every step of the delivery route. The allegory about rising above being machines is emphasized by the Cartwrights, the wealthiest family in town who buy the first automobile.  

The paperboy illustrates the idea of Food for the Moon, the concept around which the play is organized. The Stage Manager states that Joe Crowell’s education and talents are wasted when he dies for nothing in World War I. The Moon is an important character: “Beelzebub explains that death provides a release of energy that goes to sustain the Moon. If this quality of energy is too low, nature has to make up for quality by a higher number of deaths, thus wars are necessary”.⁶  

Gurdjieff used humorous satire in Beelzebub’s Tales, and there is a similar treatment of the clownish expertise of Professor Willard and Editor Webb. However, serious issues underlie Webb’s answer to an audience member’s question about the provision of culture and art in Grover’s Corners. The Editor’s shifty reply reiterates Gurdjieff’s view of the decline of “Objective” art:  

The merit of art is measured by its degree of consciousness. In order to understand “Objective” art, a person must have at least ‘flashes of objective consciousness’.⁷  

 

The keys to all the ancient arts were lost centuries ago, and now there is no sacred art “embodying the laws of the Great Knowledge and so serving to influence the instincts of the multitude.”⁸ 

After a series of episodes in which the characters that have been introduced expose their foibles, Simon Stimson, an organist and choir director at the Congregational Church, is introduced. Stimson’s minor role in the drama as a pariah, is highly significant on the esoteric level. The gossiping choir reveals Stimson as a tormented alcoholic. The townspeople ignore Stimson’s undefined difficulties, except for Mrs. Gibbs who pleads with her husband to intervene medically. Simon Stimson’s name reads as “missing.” The organist’s role is an allusion to the organ Kundabuffer:  

This term is used by Beelzebub in Tales to refer to an organ placed in men, at the base of their spines, by the Archangel Loosisos. The function of the organ is to prevent men from seeing the reality of their situation. It is feared that if men knew that, as part of organic life on Earth, their sole purpose is to feed the Moon they might kill themselves. Kundabuffer enables men to see reality upside down, and to put the satisfaction of their own pleasure before everything else. Although the organ was removed, its effects continue to manifest themselves so that men cannot perfect their being (see Tales: 88–9, 695–6).⁹ 

Wellbeloved further states that “Gurdjieff's hero in Tales, Beelzebub, says that the ‘sole means’ for saving men is for an organ to be implanted in them, like kundabuffer, but one that makes them remember the inevitability of their own and other people's deaths. Only this can destroy the egoism which causes them to hate each other (Tales: 1183)”.¹⁰ Lacking the organ of Kundabuffer, Stimson sees life as afflicted by ignorance and blindness and commits suicide.  

In the face of this exposition, the end of Act 1 presents a tragic irony, as George, Rebecca, and Emily are unable to sleep and gaze out of their respective bedroom windows, enjoying the smell of heliotrope (“follow the sun”) in the wonderful (or terrible) moonlight. Sleep and the Moon have meanings far in excess of their portrayal through the conventional language and the mundane situations of the young people. Nearly obscured by the quotidian presentation is one of the salient doctrines in the Work. Rebecca is excited by something that has caught her imagination—in Gurdjieffian terms, a shock—an address on a letter sent to a friend by a minister: “Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America. . . . ; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God.”.¹¹ The scheme on the envelope is a simplified version of the Ray of Creation:¹² 

“The Ray of Creation shows, in diagram form, the chain of worlds issuing from the Absolute (see world/s, all worlds) in which humanity finds itself”.¹³ Rebecca’s name emphasizes the equivalence of the address and the Ray of Creation, for her name is the word Ray in the phonetic code. 

The esoteric purpose of Our Town is established when the Stage Manager relates that a copy of the play will be placed in the cornerstone of the new bank building: “So—people a thousand years from now—this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century”.¹⁴ Gurdjieff called such creations legominisms: “‘Legomonism’ is the name Gurdjieff's hero Beelzebub gives in Tales to a method, devised by the Atlantians, of transmitting information from initiate to initiate from the remote past to the present”.¹⁵

Act 2 depicts the romance between Emily and George. The lovers are presented as esoteric archetypes, for Emily and George’s names read respectively as Aim and Ego. George’s interest in becoming a farmer aligns him with the Formatory apparatus, the only part of the intellectual centre that functions. Most people live their entire lives connected only through [the moving and sex centres], few ever connect with the [intellectual centre]”.¹⁶ The Emily-George marriage is explained as follows:  

[Man-as-machine] cannot carry out aims because he is unable to be or do. A man's first aim must be freedom from slavery, both within and without. He can achieve this aim only through self-knowledge gained through self-observation. . . . Our aim is to develop our soul and fulfil our higher destiny. A person who wishes to discover their aim cannot do it alone, but they can be helped: two friends can help each other, then later a teacher can help them.¹⁷

Act 3, "Death and Eternity," illustrates the singular doctrine concerning death that is presented in the Work. Once Emily has died, she finds herself in a state of waiting. This condition belongs to the idea of man being food for the Moon: 

Everything living on Earth is food for the Moon. No energy is lost in the universe; on Earth the death of each mineral, plant, animal or man sets free some energy. These ‘souls’ that go to the Moon may possess some consciousness and memory, but under conditions of mineral life can only be freed after immeasurably long cycles of general planetary evolution.¹⁸

The graveyard scene introduces a living former resident, Sam Craig, whose name is code for “mass cigar,” an allusion to the good 5 cent cigar. The good 5 cent cigar was the Cremo, which came in boxes displaying the legend “Hand Work By Skillful Workmen.” Thus, Sam Craig is an assertion that the Gurdjieff Work is a method that produces the unified man, the man with a permanent “I.” Our Town concludes with Emily’s attempt to recapture her life and her discovery that mankind—except for “saints and poets”¹⁹—is asleep. When understood as esotericism, the drama introduces the method of self-observation that is the first step in achieving self-knowledge.