Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) has found unusual currency of late. In 2011, the play lent its name to a major funding program launched by the National Endowment for the Arts; in 2017, it appeared in the center of a popular podcast and was revived by a British theater company in the wake of a terrorist attack. These productions recognize what terms like “middlebrow” obscure: Our Town is a civic mediator, a performance that installs art at the center of community life and community at the center of art. Taking inspiration from Antoine Hennion’s sociology of music, this essay ventures into the archive to trace an unfamiliar origin story for Our Town, involving a turn-of-the-century writers’ colony, a Progressive-Era historical pageant, and Wilder’s self-understanding as both confirmed bachelor and “community man.” Through the trajectory of a single play, civic mediation emerges as a pervasive strategy and ethos of American cultural practice, connecting diverse media through time and space.

中文翻译：

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我们的城镇、麦克道尔殖民地和公民调解的艺术

桑顿怀尔德的《我们的小镇》（1938 年）最近发现了一种不寻常的货币。2011 年，该剧因国家艺术基金会发起的一项重大资助计划而得名；2017 年，它出现在一个流行播客的中心，并在恐怖袭击后被一家英国剧院公司复兴。这些作品认识到像“中眉”这样的术语是模糊的：我们的城镇是一个公民调解人，一种将艺术置于社区生活中心和社区处于艺术中心的表演。这篇文章从 Antoine Hennion 的音乐社会学中汲取灵感，冒险进入档案，追溯我们镇的一个陌生起源故事，涉及世纪之交的作家殖民地、进步时代的历史盛会和怀尔德的自我理解作为公认的单身汉和“社区人”。