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Like many American plays, Primary Trust is set in a small town. Though Primary Trust’s setting of Cranberry, New York is fictional, playwright Eboni Booth's debut play, Paris, is set in the real small town of Paris, Vermont. Both plays tap into the theatrical fascination with small town American life and community.

Despite their importance in the American theatre canon, small towns are growing even smaller. As manufacturing moves overseas and high-tech industries move to urban centers, rural America faces increasing economic decline. More Americans are moving to cities where there are job opportunities, leaving an ever-shrinking population in small towns. What is it, then, that draws playwrights to write about small-town life? What universal questions does it raise for audiences? The following are a few notable examples of classic and recent plays that focus on small-town communities.


OUR TOWN
BY THORNTON WILDER

Perhaps the most well-known play about a small town, Our Town by Thornton Wilder is a Pulitzer Prize-winning classic that explores the full arc of life – from childhood, through love, marriage, parenthood, and death. Guided by an omniscient, narrating Stage Manager, the play follows the Gibbs and Webb families and the love story between George Gibbs and Emily Webb. Although the love story propels the play forward, the true focus is on Grover’s Corners, the fictional small town in which the play is set. The play is just as invested in examining the entire ecology of small-town life as it is in following George and Emily’s love story.


MIDDLETOWN
 BY WILL ENO

Heavily inspired by Our Town, Middletown also takes place in a fictional small town. Told through a series of vignettes, the play introduces us to the many eccentric characters of Middletown and loosely follows the budding friendship between the town newcomer, Mary, and long-time resident, John. In Will Eno’s play, the everyday interactions between townspeople take center stage to illuminate the hopes and anxieties that lie beneath small-town life.


THE SHIRLEY, VERMONT PLAYS BY ANNIE BAKER

The Shirley, Vermont plays are a series of four plays written by Annie Baker all set in the fictional town of Shirley, Vermont. Although each of these four plays—Circle Mirror Transformation, Nocturama, Body Awareness, and The Aliens—focuses on a different set of characters and circumstances, together they paint an incredibly detailed and hyper-realistic portrait of the town that Baker created. In these plays, Baker utilizes the quieter, slower pace of a small town to highlight the individual voices of each character.


SWEAT
BY LYNN NOTTAGE

Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat focuses on the intertwined relationship between community and economy. This play is set in a real location, Reading, Pennsylvania. It centers on a group of workers at a local steel tubing factory. The looming threat of factory layoffs tests the workers’ friendships and highlights the dark and devastating effects of deindustrialization on small towns.


GREATER CLEMENTS
BY SAM HUNTER

Like Lynn Nottage, Sam Hunter focuses on a deindustrialized town in his play Greater Clements. His story focuses on the fictional town of Clements, home of several mines that shut down 12 years prior, leaving the town economically devastated. At the beginning of the play, the remaining residents vote to unincorporate, meaning the town will no longer have a local government. Maggie, one of the town’s remaining business owners, must decide whether to stay and try to keep her family business afloat or leave and start a new life elsewhere.

Although these plays all celebrate small-town life and community, they vary dramatically in subject matter, tone, and style. Together, they show the many layered and nuanced facets of small towns. Like Primary Trust, these plays ask us to reconsider our own pre-conceived notions of small-town life and to take a closer look at the ties that bind these communities together. As you experience Primary Trust, you’re invited to consider: what are your pre-conceived notions of small towns and how does Primary Trust and other plays like it align with or challenge those experiences? 


 


References

 

McCarter, Jeremy. “Whose town? The relevance of Thornton Wilder's play today. (Theater).” The American Prospect, vol. 13, no. 23, 30 Dec. 2002, pp. 33+.

Wilder Created 'Our Town' With A Bit Of Everywhere.Weekend Edition Saturday. NPR, WNYC, New York, 24 Oct. 2012.

Wallenberg, Christopher. “Playwright Will Eno on Metaphysics and ‘Middletown.’The Boston Globe, 9 Feb. 2013.

Cayer, Jennifer. “Her Town: Annie Baker’s Americans.” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, vol. 23, no. 3, 2011, pp. 31-55,97.

Isherwood, Charles. “Word-Woozy Roundelay in Average Town Ruled by Singular Sadness.” The New York Times, 3 Nov. 2010.

Brantley, Ben. “In Boston, Listening to a Young Playwright Adept at Silence.” The New York Times, 10 Nov. 2010.

Brantley, Ben. “Review: ‘Sweat’ Imagines the Local Bar as a Caldron.” The New York Times, 26 Mar. 2017.

Isherwood, Charles. “Review: The Jobs Are Gone in ‘Sweat.’ So Are People’s Hopes.” The New York Times, 3 Nov 2016.

Hunter, Samuel D. “Review: In ‘Greater Clements,’ the Tragedy of a Town that Closed. The New York Times, 9 Dec. 2019.