The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume II Read online

  Copyright © 1998 by A. Tappan Wilder, Catharine K. Wilder and Catharine W. Guiles

  Preface; Bibliographic and Production Notes

  copyright © 1998 by A. Tappan Wilder

  Introduction copyright © 1998 by A. R. Gurney

  The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder: Volume II is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 355 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10017–0217.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that this material, being fully protected under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America and all other countries of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions, is subject to a royalty. All rights including, but not limited to, professional, amateur, recording, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are expressly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of readings and all uses of this book by educational institutions. Permission for all publication rights must be secured from the copyright holders’ representative: The Barbara Hogenson Agency, 165 West End Avenue, New York, NY 10023, (212) 874-8084; all production rights must be secured from The Robert A. Freedman Dramatic Agency, 1501 Broadway, Suite 2310, New York, NY 10036, (212) 840-5760.

  Published by arrangement with The Barbara Hogenson Agency.

  Because of space constraints the copyright information continues on page 279.

  Wilder, Thornton, 1897–1975.

  The collected short plays of Thornton Wilder.—1st ed.

  ISBN 1-55936-149-2 (cloth)ISBN 9781-55936-814-8 (eBook)

  I. Title.

  PS3545.I345A61998

  812’.52—dc2197–7734

  CIP

  Book design and typography by Lisa Govan

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  Cover and frontispiece photographs courtesy of The Thornton Wilder

  Archive, Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and

  Manuscript Library, Yale University

  First Edition, June 1998

  PART I: The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays

  Three-Minute Plays for Three Persons

  And

  The Marriage We Deplore

  The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays copyright © 1928 by Coward-McCann, Inc. Renewed by Thornton Wilder in 1956. All inquiries regarding performance rights to the sixteen plays in this volume should be addressed to The Robert A. Freedman Dramatic Agency, 1501 Broadway, Suite 2310, New York, NY 10036, (212) 840-5760; for publication rights contact The Barbara Hogenson Agency, 165 West End Avenue, New York, NY 10023, (212) 874–8084.

  The Marriage We Deplore copyright © 1997 by A. Tappan Wilder, Catharine K. Wilder and Catharine W. Guiles. For all performance rights apply to The Robert A. Freedman Dramatic Agency (address above); for publication rights contact The Barbara Hogenson Agency (address above).

  PART II: The Unerring Instinct: A Play in One Act

  The Unerring Instinct: A Play in One Act may be duplicated and produced without permission although credit must be given to the National Conference of Christians and Jews and to Mr. Wilder.

  PART III: “The Emporium”

  The Journals of Thornton Wilder: 1939–1961, selected and edited by Donald Gallup, copyright © 1985 by Union Trust Company, New Haven, CT, published with permission of the Yale University Press, New Haven and London.

  PART IV: The Alcestiad

  With Its Satyr Play

  The Drunken Sisters

  Foreword copyright © 1977 by Isabel Wilder.

  The Alcestiad copyright © 1955 by Thornton Wilder. Renewed in 1983. Published by Harper & Row, New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco & London, in 1977. For amateur performance rights apply to Samuel French, Inc., at 45 W. 25th. St., New York, NY 10010, (212) 206-8990. For all other performance rights apply to The Robert A. Freedman Dramatic Agency (address above). For publication rights contact The Barbara Hogenson Agency (address above).

  “Some Thoughts on Playwriting” copyright © 1941 by Princeton University Press. Renewed by Thornton Wilder in 1968. For all rights to this essay apply to The Barbara Hogenson Agency (address above).

  To Amos and Jenney

  and to the memory of

  their great-aunt

  Isabel Wilder

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  by A. Tappan Wilder

  Introduction

  by A. R. Gurney

  PART I

  THE ANGEL THAT TROUBLED THE WATERS AND OTHER PLAYS

  Three-Minute Plays for Three Persons

  and

  THE MARRIAGE WE DEPLORE

  Foreword

  by Thornton Wilder

  Nascuntur Poetae . . .

  Proserpina and the Devil

  Fanny Otcott

  Brother Fire

  The Penny That Beauty Spent

  The Angel on the Ship

  The Message and Jehanne

  Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

  Centaurs

  Leviathan

  And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead

  Now the Servant’s Name Was Malchus

  Mozart and the Gray Steward

  Hast Thou Considered My Servant Job?

  The Flight into Egypt

  The Angel That Troubled the Waters

  The Marriage We Deplore

  PART II

  THE UNERRING INSTINCT

  A Play in One Act

  PART III

  “THE EMPORIUM”

  Scenes from “The Emporium”

  Notes Toward “The Emporium”

  PART IV

  THE ALCESTIAD

  With Its Satyr Play

  THE DRUNKEN SISTERS

  Foreword

  by Isabel Wilder

  Notes on The Alcestiad

  by Thornton Wilder

  The Alcestiad

  Transition from The Alcestiad to The Drunken Sisters

  The Drunken Sisters

  Some Thoughts on Playwriting

  by Thornton Wilder

  Bibliographic and Production Notes

  PREFACE

  by A. Tappan Wilder

  THIS SECOND VOLUME of The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, inspired by the Wilder Centenary, focuses on the author at work. Its content offers what we hope is a lively encounter with his less familiar drama written from his teen years up into his sixties. We hope this volume also illuminates something of the sources and methods of Thornton Wilder’s artistry, indeed his struggles with creating art.

  In broad strokes the material includes: a group of early and long-out-of-print “three-minute” playlets designed to be read rather than produced; a “five-minute” confection appearing here for the first time; a short play, once widely disseminated by an organization not ordinarily associated with greenrooms; two fragments from an uncompleted major play; and a complete but rarely produced major drama. All but the confection have published pedigrees, but are found in books either long out of print or not widely known in theatrical circles much less to a broader readership.

  As windows to the author at work, this volume also contains the re-publication of several youthful pieces related to Wilder’s drama: his own observations about writing and youth; a formal essay about playwriting, written
in the same period as Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth; and selections from Wilder’s Journals, the author’s most intimate companion in the creative process.

  Isabel Wilder (1900–1995), the author’s sister and long-time personal agent and confidant, contributed a foreword to the English edition of The Alcestiad, Wilder’s little-known major play. We have reprinted it here because it deserves to be understood as an official part of the record of this drama.

  With the exception of certain short plays in the Wilder cycles on “The Seven Deadly Sins” and “The Seven Ages of Man,” the writing in this book spans almost the entirety of Wilder’s half-century as a published dramatist. That story begins with the playlets, a disciplined venture in writing which Wilder launched as a teenager. In a September 12, 1916 letter to a family member, Thornton’s father, ever nervous about his son’s long-term (read “practical” and “remunerative”) prospects, described Thornton writing just such a piece:

  He wrote a playlet the other day in ten minutes. I quietly observed him writing as rapidly as he could; no changes. That seemed to me tremendous. He certainly has genius. He lacks the power to tie down to anything he doesn’t relish, and so is barred from high achievements, I fear. And yet, genius has laws of its own.

  I take pleasure in acknowledging for this volume the same commitment and wise counsel that Terry Nemeth and Steven Samuels at TCG Books; Barbara Hogenson, the Wilder Literary Agent; and Robin Wilder demonstrated in Volume I. The press’s editorial front line has been managed by Kathy Sova, whose patience and good sense make all things possible. Donald Gallup, who inspired this enterprise in the first place, contributed proofreading and a share of the notes and bibliography. For more about the background of this project and his role in it, readers should refer to Volume I, published by TCG in 1997, a book dedicated to Mr. Gallup.

  A. R. Gurney has blessed this book—an odd duck of a Wilder book without such familiar fare as Our Town, The Long Christmas Dinner, The Matchmaker, The Skin of Our Teeth—with a wonderfully thoughtful introduction. I am honored to have the chance to thank him for helping Thornton Wilder’s works continue to speak to readers and theatregoers as their author enters his second century.

  In many ways, Wilder was never happier than when he was in command of a classroom. All of us involved with this book will have no greater satisfaction than if what Thornton Wilder wrote and how he went about writing not only entertains (as art can and should), but also helps (instructs) those who also cannot deny the urge to put their own words on paper.

  A. Tappan Wilder

  Literary Executor

  May 1998

  INTRODUCTION

  by A. R. Gurney

  HERE ARE VARIOUS SKETCHES, playlets, unproduced drafts, miscellaneous one-acts, selected essays, along with a complete full-length drama, by one of America’s most cherished writers. Much of this material was written before and after the several notable plays and novels for which Wilder is duly famous, and is best viewed as the efforts of a major artist to find his voice when he was young or to reassert it toward the end of his career. What is so impressive are the clear signs of talent in even the most problematic pieces in this collection. For example, the many short plays from The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays (Coward-McCann, 1928), were not seriously intended for professional production, yet most of them contain surprisingly beautiful flourishes of writing and bright flashes of winsome humor. The Alcestiad, on the other hand, was obviously written to be produced, and indeed was so, at the Edinburgh Festival in 1955. Yet in spite of its disappointing subsequent stage history and somewhat erudite tone, it remains an ambitious and moving attempt to articulate Wilder’s obsession with the gap between the human and the divine. Also included here are two scenes from a never completed work, “The Emporium,” which point toward a fascinating central concept and make us wish that the playwright had developed and completed this work. Wilder’s remarks on the theatre and drama are always compelling, and his essays here are particularly so. The remaining material, like all of Wilder’s work, could never have been written by anyone else and so is valuable for this reason alone.

  This collection, then, is especially useful in helping us arrive at a more general understanding of Thornton Wilder’s vision. After all, he is a difficult writer to pin down, partly because of the wide variety and diversity in everything he wrote, and partly because of the strangely elusive nature of his theme. Not only could he shift from fiction to drama without skipping a beat, but he seems equally at home in Classical Greece, Imperial Rome, Eighteenth Century Peru, and Midwestern America. Even within a particular work, he is capable of startling shifts in tone. Our Town begins as a seemingly sentimental account of small-town life in New Hampshire, but as the Stage Manager has been reminding audiences all over the world for sixty years, the play turns out to be a tough-minded, starkly powerful meditation on death and human existence. The Skin of Our Teeth is a quasi-Joycean account of human survival and self-destructiveness framed in terms of a hackneyed, stagey farce. Even The Alcestiad, for all the high seriousness of its form and style, veers suddenly into broad comedy when it brings on Teiresias, emissary of the gods, as a senile clown.

  Restless and eclectic, constantly experimenting with form and style, Wilder wrote opera libretti, a screenplay for Hitchcock, a number of astute essays, innumerable letters to some of the most distinguished writers and intellectuals of his day, all the while finding time to serve as an Army Air Force Intelligence Officer during World War II, and establishing himself as a popular and distinguished lecturer at several major universities and in innumerable bars and restaurants. (I myself met him in New Haven in the fifties where I was a student of drama, and I can testify personally to the range of his mind and the charm of his manner.) Is it possible for us to isolate any central theme underlying such protean activity? Is there any way of wrestling him to the ground?

  The material anthologized here, because much of it is so simply articulated and straightforwardly presented, may illuminate his thinking more clearly than do those more celebrated works which are complicated by the usual ambiguities of art. Certainly this volume serves to remind us that Wilder is a fundamentally religious man. He says so himself in his introduction to The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays: “Almost all the plays in this book are religious,” even though “there has seldom been an age when such a vein was less welcome or less understood.” Some of the playlets work with specifically Christian imagery, but it would be wrong to say that he restricts himself to this particular orthodoxy. In fact, sometimes he strives to undercut it, as when “Our Lord” tells Malchus in one of the short plays that the Bible “. . . isn’t always true about me, either.” Yet most of these early works concern themselves with eschatological ideas, and these will continue to pervade everything he wrote when he hit his stride.

  Several critics have suggested that Wilder’s work is informed by a kind of vague pseudo-Christian Platonism, but even this might be too reductive a categorization. It makes more sense to say that he is religious in a general way, in that he is constantly implying a higher order, a world beyond this world, a “something” which seems to be “pushing and contriving” human events so that mankind might reach a higher plane of existence. This vision is articulated with particular power in Our Town, but it seeps through most of his other work as well. Time and again he suggests that behind all the trivialities and absurdities and agonies of everyday life there must be a valid meaning, which at least poets and saints are able to perceive dimly and darkly, and toward which they can point us, in a limited way. The title of his underestimated novel, Heaven’s My Destination, might stand as a simplified statement of Wilder’s vision, especially if we define heaven as a kind of weaning away of our earthy identities and concerns, as suggested in And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead in this volume, or later in Our Town.

  Furthermore, like other writers who subscribe to a sense of order beyond what is immediately apparent or apprehensible, Wilder te
nds to focus on what we might call the clash or interplay between what he calls in Nascuntur Poetae . . . “the trivial and the divine.” Certainly the intersection between two planes of existence has always been a good subject for drama. Sophocles’ tragedies have to do with the human struggle to circumvent an Olympic order which may be cruel and undeserved, but is nonetheless relentless and unalterable. Shakespeare’s plays resonate with cosmic repercussions when his heroes and villains are viewed as breaking or reinforcing what the Elizabethans saw as a Great Chain of Being ordained by God. Even Shaw, with his commitment to Creative Evolution and a Life Force, sees his characters struggling to confirm or deny the irresistible pressures of an evolutionary destiny operating on them in spite of themselves. Wilder’s commitment to an Absolute, however clouded or unspecific, falls very much within this tradition. Like Shaw’s supermen, or Shakespeare’s kings, or Sophocles’ tragic heroes, Wilder’s Emily Webb, or Mr. Antrobus, or Alcestis all find themselves negotiating the middle ground between the world of familiar life and a more ultimate power acting on them from somewhere beyond. Wilder and Shaw both ask us to live more “intelligently,” as Wilder says in The Alcestiad, or Shaw says in almost everything he wrote, so that we are more able to decode the signals which life presents to us. They want people to “realize life while they live it,” as Emily says in Our Town.

  In fact, one might go further in comparing Wilder to Shaw. Both playwrights are in some ways still men of the nineteenth century, in that they hold a firm and ultimately optimistic belief that life has a coherent, and finally benevolent, meaning. Comic though their perspectives may be, the world is neither absurd nor arbitrary to either of them. Both insist that there is a different dimension of experience which life is striving for and which is very much worth realizing. Shaw believes in seizing it through thoughtful intelligence and daring action, and even in his Back to Methuselah, attempts to dramatize what happens when we finally get there. Wilder is more passive and ambivalent, yearning for a sense of greater awareness of larger things even as he becomes increasingly reluctant to describe it. “Love is the bridge,” he says early in his career, when he attempts to explain why five individuals fell to their seemingly random deaths at the collapse of the bridge of San Luis Rey. Yet this “answer” may now seem, to him and to us, a little reductive and disappointing. His sketches from the incomplete “Emporium” seem to point toward an unknowable, almost Kafka-esque entity presiding over everyday events. In any case, Wilder concludes his novel The Eighth Day, written toward the end of his career, by suggesting that while there is a “pattern” in the carpet of human events, there are innumerable and even conflicting ways of perceiving it. Still, for both these playwrights, as well as for their classical predecessors, there is a reality of existence beyond the workaday world which, if more clearly perceived, would inform life with coherence and meaning.