The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume I

  For assembling the scattered endeavors of the author the present collection was extremely well situated in time. When it appeared rather inconspicuously in 1931, its thirty-four-year-old author (Thornton Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 17, 1897) had already published three novels—The Cabala in 1926, The Bridge of San Luis Rey in 1927 and The Woman of Andros in 1930. This early period of his career was marked by considerable fluctuation. The Cabala, a Proustian or Jamesian work rich in characterization if not in unity and clarity, was an impressive but hardly successful novel. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a beautifully written philosophical novel, was enthusiastically received as a relief from semidocumentary, naturalistic fiction in America as well as from the pseudosophistication of the literature of the 1920s. One literary critic (Harry Salpeter) wrote that readers “were tired of realistic novels and were rotten ripe for a book like The Bridge”; Alexander Woollcott, in the prime of his reputation as an arbiter of taste, called it a novel of “aloof and untruckling beauty,” and the book brought its author his first Pulitzer Prize. But the next novel, The Woman of Andros, published in 1930, was a failure and, according to his critics, reflected in the most unfavorable light his special limitations of abstruseness, preciosity, and remoteness from the contemporary world. In the fall of that year, in fact, Wilder became the object of a violent assault by the left-wing journalist Michael Gold in the New Republic, and although he found so powerful a defender as Edmund Wilson, it was quite evident that the vein of cultivated fiction for which he had evinced a strong affinity was virtually exhausted. It was no longer considered viable art during the “socially conscious” depression period of the 1930s to which volcanic eruptions in Europe were continually adding new challenges.

  The Woman of Andros may not be a substantial novel; it is nonetheless an enchanting and affecting book, and it is more satisfying in my opinion than many an acclaimed contemporary novel. But the historical situation was plainly unfavorable to the reflective and tastefully distanced artistry which is one of the two worlds of art Wilder has inhabited in the course of his distinguished literary career. He would have to move into the other world of common reality which he had fastidiously avoided but with which he soon made a successful compromise that accounts for much of his originality and his special genius—the compromise of combining intensive observation of the common world with uncommon transcendence or sublimation of that world. Wilder himself was apparently aware of a limitation in his art when he declared some years later (in 1938) that he had shrunk from describing the modern world and was “alarmed at finding a way of casting into generalization the world of doorbells and telephones.” He was ready, he believed, “to accept the twentieth century, not only as a fascinating age to live in, but as assimilable stuff to think with.”

  He still had to accept the theatre as well. His first plays, published in 1928 under the collective title The Angel That Troubled the Waters, were three-minute-long dramatic pieces. They possess some of the literary conversation in the manner of Walter Savage Landor but without Landor’s prolixity in prose; there is considerably less dramatic pressure in them than in the miniature verse plays of Pushkin and the short pieces Musset wrote to illustrate proverbs. They are extremely beautiful pieces of writing and I particularly treasure Now the Servant’s Name Was Malchus in which “Our Lord” in heaven receives the servant of the High Priest whose ear was lopped off by Peter’s sword when Christ was arrested. Malchus would like to have his name expunged from the New Testament because the episode makes him look ridiculous. Christ invites him to stay in heaven with Him, saying, “Malchus, will you stay and be ridiculous with me?” Malchus says he will be glad to stay but isn’t sure he merits all that attention: “I wasn’t even the High Priest’s servant; I only held his horse every now and then.” Besides, it was his left ear and not his right that was the casualty of that fateful encounter; whereupon “Our Lord” assures him that “the book isn’t always true about me, either.”

  The affirmative counterpart to this rather bitter one-acter is another miniature masterpiece, The Flight into Egypt, in which Hepzibah, the talkative donkey that carries the Holy Family fleeing from Herod’s massacre of the children, loiters dangerously on the road to Egypt. On being ordered to move ahead, Hepzibah reflects that “it’s a queer world where the survival of the Lord is dependent on donkeys,” and, requesting some answers to the puzzle of faith and reason, is told by Our Lady that there will be an answer perhaps someday, but “For the present just do as I do and bear your master on.” A third dramatic capsule, Hast Thou Considered My Servant Job, asserts faith in man himself. Wilder’s often noted optimistic view of man is expressed with unusual warmth when Judas renounces Satan, who has been awaiting his favorite son, confident that he has defeated Christ, “For I build not on intermittent dreams and timid aspirations, but on the unshakable passions and lust and self-love.” The stage direction that answers this boast reads: “Suddenly the thirty pieces of silver are cast upward from the revolted hand of Judas. They hurtle across the stars and continue falling forever through the vast funnel of space.” Christ and Judas then “mount upward to their due place and Satan remains to this day, uncomprehending, upon the pavement of Hell.”

  Still, the world of art that Wilder inhabited with the writing of some forty three-minute plays (and this activity went as far back as 1915, when he wrote the first of these in California) was the same reflective and literary world that had served him in the novels. It was a strong enticement for one who had studied the classics in his youth, written ambitious undergraduate literature, pursued the study of archaeology at the American Academy in Rome after graduation from Yale in 1920, taught from 1921 to 1928 at the Lawrenceville boys’ preparatory school near Princeton, and was to teach again for over half a decade, from 1930 to 1936, at the University of Chicago under the classically inspired regime of his former Yale classmate Robert Hutchins. Characteristically, in writing the foreword to The Angel That Troubled the Waters in 1928, Wilder declared that “beauty is the only persuasion.” But with the writing of The Long Christmas Dinner and the other dramatically active one-act plays in the present volume he was plainly intent on achieving something more than “beauty.” He aimed here for the truth of common life, on the one hand, and its theatrical expression, on the other.

  Henceforth he was to inhabit two worlds, the real and the imaginary, or to blend the two in the same work. This was apparent in his later fiction—in Heaven’s My Destination, an amusing yet rueful novel about a moralistic innocent adrift in American society, published in 1935, and in The Ides of March (1948), in which he combined a novel of manners in Julius Caesar’s time with a penetrating portrait of Caesar and exquisitively reflective prose often intensified with emotion and lightened with humor. (In the invented letters and diary that make up this semi-Shavian novel one comes across well-turned observations such as Caesar’s statements that “The Gods hide themselves even in their choice of instruments,” that “Hope has never changed tomorrow’s weather,” and that “Wickedness may be the exploration of one’s liberty” and “The search for a limit that one can respect.”) But it is especially in the plays published after The Angel That Troubled the Waters that Wilder effected the reconciliation of reality and imagination which proved so rewarding in Our Town in 1938 and The Skin of Our Teeth in 1942.*

  To the plays in the present volume belongs the distinction of introducing their author as an original and effective playwright, and three of these will introduce the reader to the essence of his craftsmanship. Thus, the omniscient Stage Manager so important to the structure of Our Town first appears in Pullman Car Hiawatha and serves the same purpose of introducing the dramatic action and functioning within it. He is both the raisonneur, or commentator, and, in speaking the lines of several minor figures, a veritable constellation of characters. The Stage Manager is, so to speak, both a one-man chorus and a multiple “second character,” or deuteragonist, in the play, which reflects conventions of both Greek and Orienta
l drama in this respect while the dialogue and the characterizations are unmistakably American.

  Time is telescoped in The Long Christmas Dinner, so that ninety years of family life flow through the play without interruption in a sequence of merging scenes. Thornton Wilder was to telescope time again on a more historically significant plane in The Skin of Our Teeth a decade later. In The Long Christmas Dinner the author’s imaginative management of time is simple and persuasive. We feel as though we were floating in the flux of life and of time itself, in a broad and never-ending stream which is both “real” and “unreal.” We move ahead and are nevertheless becalmed by the sameness of the things that ultimately matter most to us, the quotidian realities that underlie the course of nations and even the ardors and endurances of men and women celebrated in history, saga, and high tragedy. And the marvel is that this effect of simplicity was achieved by the author with some of the most sophisticated strategies of dramaturgy within the competence of modern theatrical art.

  The same simplicity of subject and style combined with modernistic structural departures from realism also appears in The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, in which the author again resorts to a Stage Manager who sets up the visible action and participates in the play in several small roles. In Pullman Car Hiawatha, moreover, the author’s resources of dramatic construction and symbolic visualization even enable him to move into a world of fancy, allowing him to give a speech to a dead woman (Harriet) as affecting as Emily’s lines in the last act of Our Town and to personify places such as “Grover’s Corners” and “The Field” (too archly, perhaps) in the dramatic action. He even feels free to indulge in the playful histrionics of bringing “The Hours” onstage as “beautiful girls dressed like Elihu Vedder’s Pleiades,” each carrying a great gold Roman numeral; this, after a whimsical introduction by the Stage Manager to the effect that the minutes are “gossips,” the hours “philosophers,” and the years “theologians.” And following this, anticipating a procession of the hours in The Skin of Our Teeth, Ten O’Clock, Eleven O’Clock, and Twelve O’Clock quote Plato, Epictetus, and St. Augustine, while “the planets appear on the balcony.” Nothing less than a wistful mysticism relating our insignificant species to the universe satisfies Wilder’s imagination once he elects for histrionic freedom or “theatricalism.”

  It is to be noted, finally, that with this roving kind of dramaturgy he brings us to one more paradoxical attribute of his virtuosity. He is at once a radical and a traditionalist in employing a form of stylization that proclaims the theatrical nature of the drama instead of sedulously sustaining the so-called illusion of reality required by the conventions of modern realism. The artificial nature of the theatre was the established convention of classic, Oriental, Renaissance, Elizabethan, Neoclassic, and Romantic theatre; realistic convention, which became firmly established only in the second half of the nineteenth century, is a very late development. In returning to “theatricalism” or “theatre for theatre’s sake” (rather than “theatre for the sake of illusion”), Wilder associated himself with tradition in dramatic art. But returning to tradition in the twentieth century was an innovation, and Wilder’s manner of returning to it was personal and unique. It came about not without some dangers, the greatest of these being in his case some frolicsome bookishness and self-conscious skittishness, but it amounted to a minor revolution in the American theatre.

  Both its revolutionary character and its risks were, however, minimized by the persuasive humanity, natural tact, and good taste of the well-bred and well-educated author of short and long plays that quickly established themselves as classics of the American theatre in so far as this jittery institution can lay claim to any classics at all. A nearly infallible sense of theatre, moreover, overcame the antidramatic tendencies of Thornton Wilder’s temperament, giving liveliness to his reflectiveness and life to his artifices. In a little essay entitled Some Thoughts on Playwriting, published in 1941, he set down his creed and awareness of craft succinctly. He declared that “the stage is a fundamental pretense” and that it thrives on the acceptance of that fact and “in the multiplication of additional pretenses.” But he went on to affirm the immediacy of life in the drama despite the pretenses of the stage by writing that, “A play is what takes place. A novel is what one person tells us took place. A play visibly represents pure existing.” He did not have to defend the paradox as his own plays, beginning with The Long Christmas Dinner in 1931, provided sufficient proof of its truth and gratifying results.†

  JOHN GASSNER (1903–1967) was Sterling Professor of Playwriting and Dramatic Literature at Yale from 1956 to 1965.

  * Mr. Wilder, I should add, has been a more prolific playwright since 1931 than the above reference to his major plays would suggest. The Merchant of Yonkers, a Max Reinhardt production in 1938, was revised and entitled The Matchmaker. In this version the play was produced at the Edinburgh Festival in 1954 and in New York in 1955. He adapted André Obey’s poetic drama Le Viol de Lucrèce for Katharine Cornell and A Doll’s House for a Jed Harris presentation featuring Ruth Gordon as Nora, and he wrote an Alcestis drama, The Alcestiad, performed at the Edinburgh Festival of 1955 under the title A Life in the Sun. Mr. Wilder is now at work on two cycles of one-act plays, The Seven Ages of Man and The Seven Deadly Sins, from which three pieces were put together for a Circle in the Square Off-Broadway production in 1962. In the best of these, Childhood, one finds the same fusion of homely reality and piquant fantasy that characterizes the major stage productions.

  † Readers curious enough about the nature and justification of this paradox, this dual character of dramatic art, may refer to the following paragraph in John Gassner’s Form and Idea in Modern Theatre (pp. 141–42) The Dryden Press, New York, 1956:

  The fundamental premise of realism is the Aristotelian one that drama is an imitation of an action; realists held, therefore, that the most desirable theatre is that which imitation is closest. The fundamental premise of theatricalism is that theatre is not imitation in the narrow sense, which Aristotle never could have held, since the Greek drama upon which he based conclusions in his Poetics was not realistically imitative. For the theatricalist, the object of action and of all other “imitative” elements is not imitation but creativeness, and a special kind of creativeness at that. The realists would agree, of course, as to the value of creativeness. But the theatricalist goes one step further, and that step is the truly decisive one for the theory and practice of pure theatricalism. He maintains that there is never any sense in pretending that one is not in the theatre; that no amount of make-believe is reality itself; that in short, theatre is the medium of dramatic art, and that effectiveness in art consists in using the medium rather than concealing it.

  And Thornton Wilder provided conclusive evidence of the compatibility of convention and emotional conviction with an example in Some Thoughts on Playwriting. Starting with the statement that the theatre “lives by conventions: a convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie,” he cited the case of Euripides’ Medea. According to an ancient report, the passage in the play where Medea contemplates the murder of her children nearly produced a riot. Yet Medea was “played by a man,” “he wore a large mask on his face,” “he wore shoes with soles and heels half a foot high,” he spoke in metric lines and “all poetry is an ‘agreed-upon falsehood’ in regard to speech” and “the lines were sung in a kind of recitative”—as in opera, which “involves this ‘permitted lie’ in regard to speech.” Wilder rightly concluded that the mask, the costume and the mode of declamation were “a series of signs which the spectator interpreted and reassembled in his own mind.” That is, “Medea was being recreated within the imagination of each of the spectators.”

  BIBLIOGRAPHIC AND PRODUCTION NOTES

  THE LONG CHRISTMAS DINNER AND OTHER PLAYS IN ONE ACT

  The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act was first published 5 November 1931 in New York by Coward-McCann in a trade edition of 5,900 copies and in Ne
w Haven by Yale University Press in a special limited signed edition of 525 copies.

  In March 1931, Thornton Wilder arranged with Samuel French, Inc., New York, Los Angeles, London, Toronto (hereafter called SF) to manage all dramatic rights to the plays in this volume. Until after WWII, performances of the plays were mounted principally by amateur groups, using the book or typescript copies of the plays if an acting edition had not yet been published. After the war, several of the plays were produced professionally in this country and abroad. New York City productions over the last thirty years include: The Long Christmas Dinner, The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden and Queens of France at Cherry Lane Theater in 1966; and “Wilder, Wilder, Wilder: Three by Thornton Wilder” (The Long Christmas Dinner, The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden and Pullman Car Hiawatha) at Circle in the Square in 1993.

  The Long Christmas Dinner. First produced by the Yale Dramatic Association and the Vassar College Philaletheis at the Yale University theatre in New Haven, CT, on 25 November 1931. Some revisions in stage directions and text were made by Alexander Dean, the director, and were apparently sanctioned by the author, and later incorporated into the acting edition published by SF in 1934, and are included in this volume’s edition. First licensed productions occurred on 19 December 1931 at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH, and in New York (site unidentified). An opera based on this play, composed by Paul Hindemith with a libretto by Wilder, premiered in Mannheim, Germany, on 12 December 1961.