How Do Americans Fix “Our Town”?

What the Union ought to be

Photo by the author

For many years, I sat among my students to gaze at Paul Newman’s performance in the stage play Our Town. The class read aloud the first two acts, but when it came to Act III, when the author Thornton Wilder pondered what so many of us take for granted — life itself — my high school students needed to hear Newman, the poignant stage manager, voice his admiration…