The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder Volume I

  Copyright © 1997 by A. Tappan Wilder, Catharine K. Wilder and Catharine W. Guiles

  Preface copyright © 1997 by A. Tappan Wilder; Introduction copyright © 1997 by John Guare; Afterwords to A Ringing of Doorbells, In Shakespeare and the Bible, Youth and The Rivers Under the Earth copyright © 1997 by F. J. O’Neil; Bibliographic and Production Notes copyright © 1997 by Donald Gallup

  The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder: Volume I is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 520 Eighth Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10018–4156.

  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 which must be secured from the copyright holders’ representative: Barbara Hogenson, 165 West End Avenue, New York, NY 10023, (212) 874-8084.

  Published by arrangement with The Barbara Hogenson Agency.

  “Introductory Note” by Donald Gallup was previously published in a slightly different form in the October 1994 (82:4) issue of the Yale Review, Yale University, New Haven, CT, and is reprinted by permission. “The Two Worlds of Thornton Wilder,” by John Gassner was previously published in the 1963 edition of The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act by Harper & Row Publishers, New York, and is reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, New York.

  Because of space constraints the copyright information continues on page 324.

  This publication is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.

  TCG books are exclusively distributed to the book trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, 1045 Westgate Dr., St. Paul, MN 55114.

  Wilder, Thornton, 1897–1975.

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

  ISBN-13: 978-1-55936-813-1

  I. Title.

  PS3545.I345A61997

  812'.52—dc2197-7734

  CIP

  Book design and composition 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 1997

  Third Printing, June 2005

  PART I: The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act

  The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act (The Long Christmas Dinner, Queens of France, Pullman Car Hiawatha, Love and How to Cure It, Such Things Only Happen in Books and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden) copyright © 1931 by Yale University Press and Coward-McCann, Inc. Renewed by Thornton Wilder in 1959. All inquiries regarding rights to these six plays should be addressed to Samuel French, Inc., at 45 W. 25th St., New York, NY 10010 (SF).

  PART II: Plays for Bleecker Street (Plays in One Act for an Arena Stage)

  The Drunken Sisters copyright © 1957 by Thornton Wilder. Renewed by Union Trust Company, executor, 1985. For amateur rights SF; for all other rights apply to Robert A. Freedman, Inc., 1501 Broadway, Suite 2310, New York, NY 10036 (RAF). Bernice copyright © 1957 by Thornton Wilder. Renewed by Union Trust Company, executor, 1985. All rights RAF. The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five copyright © 1957 by Thornton Wilder. Renewed by Union Trust Company, executor, 1985. All rights RAF. A Ringing of Doorbells copyright © 1997 by A. Tappan Wilder, Catharine K. Wilder and Catharine W. Guiles. All rights RAF. In Shakespeare and the Bible copyright © 1997 by A. Tappan Wilder, Catharine K. Wilder and Catharine W. Guiles. All rights RAF. Someone from Assisi copyright © 1961 by Thew Wright, trustee. Renewed by Union Trust Company, executor, 1989. Amateur rights SF; all other rights RAF. Cement Hands copyright © 1997 by A. Tappan Wilder, Catharine K. Wilder and Catharine W. Guiles. All rights RAF. Infancy copyright © 1961 by Thew Wright, trustee. Renewed by Union Trust Company, executor, 1989. Amateur rights SF; all other rights RAF. Childhood copyright © 1960 by Thornton Wilder. Renewed by Union Trust Company, executor, 1988. Amateur rights SF; all other rights RAF. Youth copyright © 1997 by A. Tappan Wilder, Catharine K. Wilder and Catharine W. Guiles. All rights RAF. The Rivers Under the Earth copyright © 1997 by A. Tappan Wilder, Catharine K. Wilder and Catharine W. Guiles. All rights RAF.

  Excerpts. Pages xxi–xxii: Gertrude Stein excerpt is taken from a speech presented at the University of Chicago and then printed in Thornton Wilder’s introduction to Four in America by Gertrude Stein, copyright © 1947 by Alice B. Toklas, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1947. Page xxiii: William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” from The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams, copyright © 1938, 1951 by William Carlos Williams, New Directions Publishing Corporation, New York. Page xxiv: William Carlos Williams, I Wanted to Write a Poem, copyright © 1958 by William Carlos Williams, Beacon Press, Boston, 1967. Page xxiv: Ezra Pound, “Canto VII,” copyright © 1948 by Ezra Pound, from The Cantos of Ezra Pound, New Directions Books, New York, 1990. Page xxv: Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Miniver Cheevy,” copyright © 1910 by Edwin Arlington Robinson, from The Town Down the River, copyright © 1910 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, renewed in 1938 by Ruth Nivison; Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Richard Cory,” copyright © 1897 by Edwin Arlington Robinson, from The Children of the Night, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.

  To Donald Gallup With Appreciation

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  by A. Tappan Wilder

  Introduction

  by John Guare

  PART I

  THE LONG CHRISTMAS DINNER AND OTHER PLAYS IN ONE ACT

  The Long Christmas Dinner

  Queens of France

  Pullman Car Hiawatha

  Love and How to Cure It

  Such Things Only Happen in Books

  The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden

  PART II

  PLAYS FOR BLEECKER STREET

  (Plays in One Act for an Arena Stage)

  Introductory Note

  by Donald Gallup

  “The Seven Deadly Sins”

  The Drunken Sisters

  Bernice

  The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five

  A Ringing of Doorbells

  In Shakespeare and the Bible

  Someone from Assisi

  Cement Hands

  “The Seven Ages of Man”

  Infancy

  Childhood

  Youth

  The Rivers Under the Earth

  The Two Worlds of Thornton Wilder

  by John Gassner

  Bibliographic and Production Notes

  PREFACE

  by A. Tappan Wilder

  THORNTON WILDER’S devotion to the short play lasted from his grade school years through his sixth decade. Given the longevity of this interest—the variety of the forms and subjects with which he practiced it, and their importance for understanding Wilder’s work as a whole
—it is not surprising that his literary executor, Donald Gallup, proposed a collected edition of short plays the year after the author’s death in 1975.

  Mr. Gallup put the project aside, however, when the playwright’s family decided to abide by the author’s desire to withdraw several plays from both publication and production. In Pigeons on the Granite: Memoirs of a Yale Librarian (1988), Mr. Gallup phrased the issue this way: “I had not foreseen that Isabel, and to a certain extent also their older brother Amos, would be so governed by what they felt Thornton himself would have wanted. I began on the premise that all finished uncollected work ought to be printed, especially work that had been produced.”

  Near the end of her life, Isabel Wilder (1900–1995), the author’s sister and long-time personal agent, changed her mind about the embargoed works. As a result, in 1994, The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five was published in the Yale Review together with Mr. Gallup’s introductory note about Wilder’s ambitious plans for fourteen shorter plays depicting “The Seven Deadly Sins” and “The Seven Ages of Man.” The following year, The Wreck was produced successfully on the New York stage, and was subsequently published in The Best American Short Plays, 1994–1995.

  The success of The Wreck opened the doors to this edition. Each of its two volumes is constructed around one of the previously published collections of Wilder’s short plays, both out of print in English: The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays (1928) anchors Volume II (to be published in 1998); and The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act (1931) the book at hand.

  In 1963, Harper & Row arranged for a new edition of the latter volume, adding to it an introduction by John Gassner (1903–1967), then Sterling Professor of Playwriting and Dramatic Literature at Yale. Mr. Gallup and Isabel Wilder most appropriately viewed this often-cited piece as part of the record. It has therefore been included here. This TCG volume also restores Such Things Only Happen in Books to the collected work. This play appeared in the 1931 edition but was subsequently withdrawn by the author.

  With the exception of F. J. O’Neil’s contributions, Donald Gallup helped prepare the material for this volume, including overseeing the first appearance of Cement Hands, and providing the bibliographical notes. For Volume I, he has also revised his Yale Review introduction to take account of this volume’s broader scope.

  In 1995, after twenty years, Donald Gallup stepped down as Thornton Wilder’s literary executor. In addition to building up and managing the Wilder archive, he was responsible for editing three important works of interest to scholars and the broader public alike: The Alcestiad or A Life in the Sun: A Play in Three Acts—With a Satyr Play: The Drunken Sisters (1977), American Characteristics and Other Essays (1979) and the essential tool for understanding much of Wilder’s mind, and works-in-progress, The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939–1961 (1985).

  As curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Mr. Gallup shared his day with the papers of many writers besides Wilder, among them T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Eugene O’Neil, Ezra Pound and Edmund Wilson. With insight and candor, these, and other prominent figures in twentieth-century letters, come alive in Pigeons on the Granite.

  Because the Wilders lived near Yale, Mr. Gallup knew Thornton and Isabel especially well, and often heard Thornton read from works-in-progress at the well-known address on Deepwood Drive in Hamden, Connecticut. Here is Gallup describing Wilder trying to be helpful to his future literary executor: “During [his] last years, Thornton would often greet me at Deepwood Drive with the announcement that he had destroyed another fifty pages that afternoon that I’d not have to be bothered with when he was no longer around.”

  It is characteristic of Donald Gallup’s generosity to have insisted that I take over as editor of this book. The least I would accept, I insisted in turn, was to permit my name to rest in his shade. Whatever the duties, they allow me (with some secrecy) to perform the happy act of dedicating this volume to him on behalf of my mother, sister and I (the sister-in-law, niece and nephew of Thornton Wilder). Behind the language lies our admiration for building the Wilder archive and for the intellectual companionship, loyalty, affection and sheer pleasure he brought into Thornton and Isabel’s lives.

  F. J. O’Neil also heard Wilder read from his work at the house on Deepwood Drive. The two met in 1950 when Wilder was teaching at Harvard as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, and “Jim” O’Neil was a stage-struck undergraduate, acting in, among other plays, The Skin of Our Teeth. Through visits and correspondence their friendship lasted until Thornton’s death. With Donald Gallup, F. J. O’Neil served as one of the ushers at Thornton’s memorial service.

  In 1995, Mr. O’Neil, whose theatrical career has included acting and directing, began to explore the manuscripts of the “Ages” and “Sins” plays, which Wilder had left unfinished but had not destroyed (itself a sign of the importance he attached to them). After much detective work on the surviving manuscripts written in the author’s cramped handwriting style, Mr. O’Neil produced his important contribution to this volume: Youth, The Rivers Under the Earth, A Ringing of Doorbells and In Shakespeare and the Bible. The recovery of these last two plays allows us to include in this volume, for the first time, a full cycle of “The Seven Deadly Sins” plays.

  In editing these four plays for this book, incorrect spellings and other minor and obvious errors, such as placement of an incorrect character name, have been corrected, and punctuation adjusted to conform to modern usage. Mr. O’Neil offers his interpretation for the ending of these plays. He does this by adding stage directions to all four plays and, in one case (The Ringing of Doorbells), by adding a reprise of a Wilder line. These changes are indicated by brackets and discussed in brief afterwords to each play. The complete record of Mr. O’Neil’s labors will be added to the Thornton Wilder Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

  In addition to his well-known observation that a wastepaper basket is a writer’s best friend, Wilder sometimes added that a cot is the worst enemy. A literary executor could well say that his or her charge’s unpublished materials are the worst enemy. Beyond entertaining scholars in dark corners, should work considered unfinished by the author be permitted to see daylight?

  It was not difficult to answer the question in the case of these four plays; all who have read them believe that they are worthy, at a minimum, of inclusion in this collection, and thus available to a broad public. And the maximum? The theatre, as Thornton often pointed out (and celebrated), is a collaborative enterprise. Time and the interest on the part of directors, producers and actors will reveal how these “new” plays (as well as Bernice and Cement Hands) “play” at the beginning of a new century.

  It was Thornton Wilder’s intention, expressed as late as 1966, that the completed cycles of the “Ages” and “Sins” plays appear first in print as a “reading book.” For this reason, until 1970, Samuel French distributed only mimeographed copies of Childhood and Infancy. Now, thanks to Barbara Hogenson, the Wilder literary agent; Terry Nemeth, Steve Samuels and Kathy Sova at TCG Books; and John Guare, we have the “reading book” at last. That it includes the work of both the young playwright and the elder statesman makes the Wilder Centenary (forgive me) still wilder.

  A. Tappan Wilder

  Literary Executor

  May 1997

  INTRODUCTION

  by John Guare

  IMAGINE A MOUNT RUSHMORE for American playwrights located—why not—at 42nd Street and Broadway, the crossroads of the world. We’d surely look up to admire Thornton Wilder’s professorial head, along with the massive heads of O’Neill, Miller and Williams. But would Wilder be the Teddy Roosevelt of Mount Rushmore? We don’t question his being there. We’re just not quite sure why.

  We learned in school that Thornton Wilder is one of America’s most distinguished and—that horrible word—beloved playwrights. Beloved? Well, because Our Town gave us an image of our American selves that we like to live
with. Does Our Town make Thornton Wilder the theatrical equivalent of Norman Rockwell? Thornton Wilder has an odd place in the pantheon.

  He was famous enough in 1953 to be on the cover of Time (published by his Yale classmate, Henry Luce). Under his portrait on the cover in front of a Jasper Johns-ish American flag is his quote: “The American is the first planetary mind.” In 1974, in Reader’s Digest, S. N. Behrman recalled going with Thornton Wilder to a dinner at the White House for André Malraux during the Kennedy years. Behrman, a very successful playwright of the 1930s, praised Wilder to the Reader’s Digest readership as “America’s universal man.” I can’t imagine Reader’s Digest ever publishing a celebration of Tennessee Williams.

  Why do we think Wilder is important? Why do we vaguely think he’s middlebrow and then, as I did, become overwhelmed by the sheer emotional size of Our Town, when seen in a production like Gregory Mosher’s 1991 Lincoln Center Theater production with Spalding Gray as the Stage Manager?

  Thornton Wilder. What do we do with this man who was a playwright, novelist, actor, teacher, musician, essayist, translator, adaptor, opera librettist and screenwriter (for what some people think is Hitchcock’s finest film, Shadow of a Doubt)? This was a man who as a hobby—it had to be an act of love—spent years dating the four hundred extant plays of Lope de Vega. This was a man whose nickname was The Library. At his memorial service on January 18, 1976 (six weeks after his death on December 7, 1975), Ruth Gordon, his great Dolly Levi, said in her tribute: “Somebody asked [my husband] Garson Kanin where he went to college. He said he never did. He went to Thornton Wilder.”

  Wilder’s fame relies today not on his novels, such as The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which brought him blockbuster fame at the age of thirty, but solely on the reputation of three plays . . . well, two major plays, which each won the Pulitzer Prize, and a third play whose fame rests on, and has been supplanted by, its transmogrification into the glitter of Hello Dolly.