On Saturday, November 12, I attended a performance of Our Town. The first impression I had was of “ugh” because I saw the set and saw nothing but the painted walls and two sets of tables and chairs on platforms. My first thought was “again?" A plain, no-prop performance?” I assumed this play would be like another I had seen, Crumpled Classics. It was a plain set with an even poorer plot. However, as Our Town started and the Stage Manager character walked on, I soon was carried back to the early 1900s by the smooth and dramatized voice of Stage Manager, played by a female with a deep clear voice. I saw the depth the story had and enjoyed the spark it allowed my imagination to take. Picturing Main Street with the small clean shops selling necessities and some niceties, the steam chugging out of the train as it pulled into the station every morning, and the horse and cow with thick but dirty coats let my curiosity grow. I invested in the story by relating to the church choir as it quietly sang the song and also seeing the actresses and actors pretend to eat out of a bowl or drink from a cup, enhanced by the perfectly timed sound effects from backstage, such as a thump when the newspaper was tossed to the front door each morning and when the lawnmower was being pushed across the yard with great bursts and heaves. The story follows the tale of two school friends, Emily and George, falling in love and marrying each other. The third and final act, starting with Emily’s funeral, she died in childbirth to their second child, initiates the philosophical part of the play, as we walked back with Emily into life and seeing how many blessings live people took for granted, seeing how wonderful the world is yet still separated from it, and aggravatingly unable to show the live people how beautiful the earth and their lives really are. Warm baths, coffee, and the town itself were among the list of things Emily missed as she walked back up the hill to the graveyard and took her place among the dead. There, with the others, she would wait for years, learning to how let go of the living world and prepare for eternity.