Text Talk

Below are lines of text from the play, Our Town. Using the context of the line and your knowledge of the play’s setting, see if you can figure out the meaning of the bold text. [LA.A.1.4]

Stage Manager: Here’s the Town Hall and Post Office combined; jail’s in the basement. Bryan once made a speech from these very steps here.
Stage Manager: This is Mrs. Gibbs’ garden. Corn…peas…beans…
hollyhocks…heliotrope and a lot of burdock.
Joe Crowell: Well, of course, it’s none of my business—but I think if a person starts out to be a teacher, she ought to stay one.
Howie Newsome: Somep’n went wrong with the separator.
Mrs. Gibbs: Strawberry phosphates—that’s what you spend it on.
Mrs. Gibbs: ‘N he wormed his way into my parlor, and, Myrtle Webb, he offered me three hundred and fifty dollars for Grandmother Wentworth’s highboy, as I’m sitting here!
Stage direction in Act I: PROFESSOR WILLARD, a rural savant, pince-nez on a wide satin ribbon, enters from the right with some notes in his hand.
Professor Willard: Grover’s Corners lies on the old Pleistocene granite of the Appalachian range.
Professor Willard: A shelf of Devonian basalt crosses it with vestiges of Mesozoic shale, and some sandstone outcroppings...
Dr. Gibbs: …and Whistler’s “Mother”—those are just about as far as we go.
Stage Manager: So I’m going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now’ll know a few simple facts about us—more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight.
I think if you hold your breath you can hear the train all the way to Contoocook.
Stage Manager: Soon as they’ve passed their last examinations in solid geometry and Cicero's Orations, looks like they suddenly feel themselves fit to be married.
Stage Manager: It’s like one of those Middle West poets said: You’ve got to love life to have life, and you’ve got to have life to love life…It’s what they call a vicious circle.
Stage direction in Act III graveyard: When they speak their tone is matter-of-fact, without sentimentality and, above all, without lugubriousness.

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