79-87 Start of Act 3 Flashcards
- (Stage manager takes their place)
This time nine years have gone by, friends - summer, 1913. Gradual changes in Grovers Corners. Horses are getting rarer. Farmers coming into town in Fords. Everybody locks their house doors now at night. Ain’t been any burglars in town yet, but everybody’s heard about ‘em.
- Liz: You’d be surprised, though - on the whole things don’t change much around here.
This is certainly an important part of Grover’s Corners.
- Liz: … they might pass the same time up here in New Hampshire.
Over there - (pointing to stage left) are the old stones, - 1670, 1680. Strong-minded people that come a long way to be independent. Summer people walk around there laughing at the funny words on the tombstones… it don’t do any harm.
- Liz: Wherever you come near the human race, theres layers and layers of nonsense…
Over there are some Civil War veterans. Iron flags on their graves… New Hampshire boys… had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than fifty miles of it themselves. All they knew was the name, friends - the United States of America. The United States of America. And they went and died about it.
- Liz: And Mrs. Soames who enjoyed the wedding so - you remember?
Oh, and a lot of others. And Editor Webb’s boys, Wallace, whose appendix burst while he was on a Boy Scout trip to Crawford Notch.
- Liz: We’re all glad they’re in a beautiful place and we’re coming up here ourselves when our fit’s over.
Now there are some things we all know, but we don’t take’m out and look at’m very often. We all know that SOMETHING in eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even stars…
- Liz: Theres something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.
You know as well as I do that the dead don’t stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they lose hold of the earth… and the ambitions they had… and the pleasures they had… and the things they suffered… and the people they loved. They get weaned away from earth. that’s the way I put it, - weaned away. And they stay here while the earth part of ‘em burns up, burns out. And all that time they’re growing indifferent to what’s join’ on in Grovers Corners.
- Liz: - but that’s the way it is: mother ‘n daughter…
husband ‘n wife…
- Liz: …enemy ‘n enemy…
…money ‘n miser…
- Liz: …all those terribly important things kind of grow pale around here.
An what’s left when memory’s gone, and your identity, Mrs. Smith? (JOE STODDARD ENTERS , SAM CRAIG ENTERS)
Well! There are some LIVING people. There’s Joe Stoddard, our undertaker, supervising a new-made grave. And here comes a Grovers Corner girl, that left town to go out west.
