Grover`s Corners, New Hampshire

Grover’s Corners,
New Hampshire
42° 40' N and 70° 37' W
By Julia Proctor ’06, Photograph by Brett Simison
I’ve lived in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, three times now,
each occasion as Emily Webb, the protagonist of Thornton Wilder’s 1938
Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town.
The people who live in this fictional village are unsentimental, hard
working, and full of love, though they don’t always have the tools to
express it. As Wilder wrote in the preface to the 1957 collection Three
Plays, Grover’s Corners is a lens in which “to find value above all price for
the smallest events in our daily life.” The door is always open to visitors.
Grover’s Corners has been my benchmark to measure time and growth.
I first played Emily at summer camp on Lake Champlain; it was my first
big lead in a play, the role gave me the confidence to pursue my love for
acting. Ten years later as a professional in a production in Baltimore,
Maryland, I was made aware of the pressure of the iconic role and my
own shortcomings as a developing actress. Now married, nearing 30, and
revisiting the play this past summer in the acting ensemble at the Bread
Loaf School of English, I found Grover’s Corners to be a new place, different from the one I knew as a teenager. It no longer felt like a physical
location, but rather a fragile moment in time—our moment in time. It
creates community by showing us community, and you don’t need to be
from small-town New England to understand it.
Wilder wrote: “The climax of this play needs only five-square feet of
boarding and the passion to know what life means to us.” What happens on
those five-square feet is funny, awkward, brutal, optimistic, and forgiving.
That world—Grover’s Corners—is home to me. It is a home created by the
artists and the audiences who visit it. In this imagined world, I have been
most fully myself. I find remnants of it in Brooklyn, exchanging smiles
with a stranger, biking through the park, sharing dinner at home with
my husband and friends. It’s a place that allows reflection and growth.
It can happen anywhere or anytime—as long as you leave room for
hope.
Julia Proctor ’06 is an actress living in Brooklyn with her husband, Phil
Aroneanu ’06. For more on Julia, visit www.juliaproctor.com.
48 Middlebury MAGAZ I N E
Photograph by Louisa Conrad
Fall 2013 49