“I feel like I’m wandering through the lost epilogue to Our Town.”
Veronica Lodge in 1x01 The River’s Edge (2016), written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
Our Town (1938), a play by Thornton Wilder: Our Town tells the story of a small town, Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, in order to tell us the story of every town, the whole world over. Narrated by the “Stage Manager”, we follow the Gibbs and Webb families, residents of Grover’s Corners, through twelve years of life changes -- from the mundane in Act I, “Daily Life,” to the romantic in Act II, “Love and Marriage,” to the devastating in Act III, “Death and Eternity.” Through the young lovers Emily and George, their strong and loving parents, and the many other Grover’s Corners’ locals, Wilder delivers universal truths about what it means to be human. “Oh, earth,” Emily Webb exclaims towards the play’s end, “you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you.” [x]
What could an epilogue to Our Town look like, you may ask? Excellent question! Act III closes with Emily’s ghost observing her funeral (having died in childbirth) with other ghosts in the graveyard and reflecting on the living’s inability to appreciate what they have. She watches her husband grieve over her tombstone and the play ends. Not a whole lot of room for interpretation. Perhaps Ms. Lodge is ruminating over the intricacies of small town life and the fleeting nature of life, having just left her ‘previous’ life of luxury; maybe she has an awareness of Riverdale’s own meta-narrator in Jughead (wouldn’t that be fun? I’d kill to have Jughead break the fourth wall); maybe she just knows Our Town is about a small town and wanted to appear worldly to the brilliant Ms. Cooper. Who’s to say?