You should have had to fall in love, fear death or live independently as a prerequisite. Whatever year of school you had to read Our Town was too soon. You thought Thorton Wilder didn't connect with your new life. Decades published and dead, he knew differently and knew about you.

Our Town has always been metatheater for its play-within-a-play-ness, the knowing Stage Manager, the explanatory introductions and asides, but the production I saw last night was meta-audience. Reviewers had called it revelatory. Friends who knew my reactions said it would crash me in a ripped, inspirational way. Both turned out to be right, but none prepared me for the state of community. The name of the play was the name of the play, but art's first-person plural was rarely so real.

The Stage Manager sat next to you with the newspaper. Main Street was at your feet. The clothes were yours, and you smelled the bacon and saw the eggs pouring. When the lights came up for the bows, the actress climbing from her new graveyard plot was visibly shaken. And the engagement was mutual. I googled and came across the actress' great tweet from a ways back: Overheard a very loud whisper from the audience upon my Act 3 entrance, "She must have recently died." If you had grown up to feel life and conveyance strongly, you weren't alone.

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