What role does the Stage Manager play throughout Our Town?

The
Stage Manager has the same kind of role that would be filled by a minor character who is the
narrator of a short story or novel. His main function is to provide . He introduces most of the
other characters by their names and tells the audience something about them. One advantage of
this rather unusual dramatic device is that the characters do not have to go through the usual
rigamarole of addressing each other by their names so that the audience will know who they are.
The characters are not forced to provide much in the way of exposition disguised as
conversation. They just live their lives.

The Stage Manager differs from the
typical minor-character narrator of a short story or novel in that he is omniscient. He not only
knows all the people and all about their business, but he knows what is going to happen to them
in the future. Here is an example. Joe Crowell, Jr. is delivering the morning paper, as
everybody in the audience can see. It is early in Act I.

STAGE MANAGER
Want to tell you something about that boy Joe Crowell there. Joe
was awful brightgraduated from high school, head of his class. So he got a scholarship to
Massachusetts Tech. Graduated head of his class there, too. It was all wrote up in the Boston
paper at the time. Goin' to be a great engineer, Joe was. But the war broke out and he died in
France.All that education for nothing.

The Stage Manager
tells us that the day is May 7, 1901. Joe is still a kid. But the Stage Manager can tell us that
he died in World War I, which America entered in 1917. His prescience has an uncanny effect. He
is talking about the past, present and future all at the same time. The boy we are watching
delivering his papers is already dead. Time is treated differently in . It
seems as if past, present and future are all somehow the same.

The Stage
Manager strikes us as being a small-town philosopher as well as a manager and narrator. He has
the ability to move in and out of people's homes and even to listen to the dead men and women
conversing at the town cemetery. In Act II we learn that his name is Mr. Morgan and he owns the
town drugstore, where he makes ice-cream sodas for Emily Webb and George Gibbs. This is the
present, but it is also the past. Emily and George will be married. Emily will die in 1913 and
join the other dead townspeople at the cemetery. But she will return to Grover's Corners briefly
in 1899 on a sentimental journey which proves to be a heartbreaking disappointment. It is easy
to see why the Stage Manager, who knows everything about the future and remembers everything
about the past, is needed to hold this play together.recklessly violates Aristotle's unities of
time, place and action, but the audience does not have the slightest trouble following or
understanding what is happening, thanks to the Stage Manager.