Shark Heart: A Love Story

Our Town is a 1938 play by Thornton Wilder that Lewis selects as the school’s annual theater production during his last year of teaching. Often hailed as one of the most important pieces of American playwriting, Our Town is a metatheatrical story that follows the mundane happenings in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners. Acts II and III focus on George Gibb and Emily Webb, a couple who are tragically separated by Emily’s death sometime between Act II and Act III. As the primary literary reference point for Shark Heart, Our Town is a motif that reinforces the novel’s metatheatrical nature and its interest in Life as Metatheater, foreshadows the inevitable separation of Wren and Lewis, and represents Lewis’s lofty theater ambitions.

Habeck had personal reasons for making Our Town what she calls the “centerpiece” of Shark Heart; at the age of 11, she played a small role in a community production of Our Town and was profoundly impacted by Emily’s story. Describing it as “the perfect puzzle piece in the story,” she has said of the play’s appearances in her novel, “Our Town is seemingly innocuous […] but to my mind, it gets at something far more stirring, making