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Our Town author Thornton Wilder, winner of three Pulitzer Prizes, best remembered for his stage portraits of small town American family life, went to Emerson Grammar School in Berkeley’s Elmwood District, and was an alumnus of Berkeley High School class of 1915. 

Second son of a newspaper editor, Wilder was born in 1897 in Madison, Wis., that “heartland” whence much of the literature about small town Americana would originate, especially from the Chicago School of the second and third decades of the 20th century. 

But Wilder’s family didn’t stay put. His father, Amos Wilder, was appointed U.S. Consul General in Hong Kong in 1906. His family joined him for six months, then returned to the United States until 1911. The family briefly reunited accompanying Amos Wilder to his new post in Shanghai, and then returning to settle in Berkeley. 

After a lonely boarding school stint in Ojai, Thornton Wilder enrolled at Berkeley High for his junior and senior years, living at home with his sisters and his mother, Isabella Niven Wilder, who attended lectures at UC, joined foreign-language discussion groups and sewed costumes for her children’s walk-on parts in Greek Theatre productions. 

Thornton, who’d begun writing stories and plays in Ojai, began to frequent the Doe Library on the UC campus to read European Expressionist drama and newspaper accounts of the great German director Max Reinhardt. 

After graduating from Berkeley High, Wilder enrolled at Oberlin College, studying classics, then transferred to Yale, where his first full-length play appeared in the Yale Literary Magazine in 1920, though not to be staged until 1926. 

After a stateside stint in the artillery corps during World War I, Wilder studied archaeology at the American Academy in Rome, then earned a master’s degree in French Literature at Princeton in 1926 before embarking on a teaching career. 

Even after the success of his novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which earned him his first Pulitzer Prize in 1927, Wilder continued to think of himself as a teacher, and became friendly with Gertrude Stein when both were lecturers in literature at the University of Chicago. 

Wilder continued writing and successfully publishing until his death in 1975. Among his best-known works are The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), which earned Wilder his third Pulitzer; the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943, set in Santa Rosa); and The Matchmaker (1954), which was adapted into the musical Hello Dolly! in 1964. 

Though set in fictional Grover’s Corner in New Hampshire, a few slight traces of Wilder’s own family life may occasionally be detected in Our Town. The protagonist’s father is the town’s newspaper editor (Mr. Webb, played at the Rep by Paul Vincent O’Connor), who is somewhat ineffectually scornful of his wife’s constant “motivating” of their children, and a lecture on local prehistory and fossils by “Professor Willis from our state university,” (Jarion Monroe for the Rep). 

The younger characters of Our Town play a notable part in the script, and are played well by the junior members of the Rep’s cast, including Trevor Cheitlin, Jacob Cohen, Alex Kaplan, Gideon Lazarus, Sarag Smithton and Emily Trumble. 

Three are from Berkeley: Trevor Cheitlin, a seventh grader at Prospect Sierra and acting student at Berkeley Rep’s school and ACT, is in his first professional stage production, splitting a couple of parts with Gideon Lazarus, including a newsboy cynical about matrimony; Gideon, has attended two Rep Summer Intensives and plays double bass at The Crowden School, where he’s a sixth-grader; and Emily Trumble, playing little sister to George Gibbs, a seventh grader at King Middle School and veteran of the Willows Theatre in Concord and CalShakes in Orinda, as well as many other shows around Contra Costa, and as a spelling bee contestant in the new film Bee Season. 

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