Our Town (with some Beast connections)

The stage director is an outsider, yet very involved in the inner workings of how the community and characters are portrayed. He specifically separates himself while he is the narrator, but also pops in and out of other roles when they need to be filled. He reminds me a lot of Melies in this way. He stands back and lays everything out for the audience, and other times he can't help but jump in to enhance the story. Basically, the stage director is equivalent to a movie director's role. He determines what gets emphasized and when, who should come in next, and where they should go. He manipulates time too! Between the first and second acts three years go by. Between the second and third acts nine years go by. He picks certain days to show the audience, dictates time jumps from year to year and even determines how long characters live for. Additionally, he shares a special connection with the audience. In more than one instance, talks to them in a very informal, colloquial manner more like he's telling a memory, rather than a historical account of a town.

On a separate note (or maybe not so separate), Emily has a similar experience to Hushpuppy in Act 3. She enters “the afterlife” and finds a maternal figure in Mrs. Gibbs, her mother-in-law, similar to Hushpuppy’s encounter with her mother in Elysian Fields. Emily continues talking to her but Mrs. Gibbs shushes her, not in a stern way but more of a comforting, let-it-go way. At one point Emily says, “Oh, Mother Gibbs, I never realized before how troubled and how…how in the dark live persons are…From morning till night, that’s all they are- troubled” (97). I think this may be connected to the Bathtub and how it has so many holidays compared to the one or two that “normal society” has. Emily also gets the idea in her mind that she can go back to the world of the living and relive days, happy days. Is this what Hushpuppy realized after she was cuddled by her mother? That she can go back and make things better? Choose to live a better life? Emily keeps saying she’ll choose a happy day to relive; Hushpuppy went back and chose to help her father, and make her world happier. She went back to correct her error, to attain absolution for her sin, the sin of hitting her father in the heart and knocking him down. She went back to nurse him and comfort him, to try and make things right. And only then was he able to fully “rest”, by dying and no longer having to suffer in his sickness.