Our Town is a classic American play about the daily lives of the Gibbs family, the Webb family, and their neighbors in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, early in the 20th century. Act I opens with the appearance of the Stage Manager, who speaks directly to the audience. He tells where all of the main buildings of the town are located, gives pertinent facts about Grover's Corners, and provides introductions to the characters. Act II carries the story forward with the courtship and marriage of George Gibbs and Emily Webb. In Act III, Emily has died while giving birth to her second child. During and after her funeral, she converses with other dead persons in the cemetery. She then gets permission to return briefly to life, but finds it's not what she thought it would be. Emily learns that life goes too fast, and people don't take time to appreciate one another.

The play premiered in 1938 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Our Town has become one of the most popularly produced plays of the twentieth century. It is quite possible that on almost any given day of the year, somewhere in the world, Our Town is being performed by either a professional company or an amateur troupe of actors.

There are echoes of classic Greek drama: the Stage Manager as Chorus and the three-act structure as trilogy. Like its Greek ancestors, Our Town concerns itself with the continuing cycle of life, humankind's nearest understanding of eternity.

The central values of the play – morality, community, the family, appreciation of everyday pleasures – are traditional. Yet, Wilder's methods of presenting these values on the stage are anything but. Scarce scenery, few props, mimed actions, and dramatis persona who fluidly travels both in and out of the action of the play – all these make for a radically innovative way of presenting a drama. This was certainly a risk at a time when theater productions were known for their lavish costumes and scenery. However, these "experimental techniques" allow the audience to focus on the characters themselves rather than on their location and how they related to objects that surrounded them.

In Our Town, Thornton Wilder artfully manipulates time and place and relates the here-and-now of a small, New England village to the timeless concerns of all humankind. He builds the action of the play toward the dramatic revelation that human life, however painful, dreary, or inconsequential its daily events, is both a precious gift in its own right as well as a portion of the mysterious plan that rests in the "Mind of God."