The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume II

by Thornton Wilder

  With such religious impulses at the heart of his work, one can understand why Wilder, like his distinguished predecessors, gravitated so naturally to the stage. Drama grew out of religion, and plays are still, in many ways, ritual enactments performed in front of the community to reinforce our sense of our common selves in terms of some larger backdrop. Behind the actors is the plot, and behind most good plots is a sense of moral order which the audience apprehends almost intuitively. When we watch a play, as opposed to when we read a book, we can more easily sense the pressures of a larger, communal vision impacted in the events of the plot and reinforced by the common responses of the audience around us. In most plays, the audience knows more than the characters do, and it is this sense of dramatic irony which brings about the tragic shudders or infectious laughter which give drama its particular power. Because plays tend to work this way, writers who want to suggest that larger forces are operating behind the ostensibly random events of daily life are naturally drawn to the stage.

  Furthermore, since drama is, however specific, a crude, confined and intractable medium for articulating such expansive ideas, its very limitations also seem to have attracted Wilder. He delights in calling the audience’s attention to the artificial and crude machinery of the theatre, and gains some of his most powerful effects by reminding us that events onstage are a hopelessly inadequate approximation of what they might ultimately mean. The short plays in this volume show Wilder discovering how he can play with the medium in these terms. In The Flight into Egypt, for example, Hepzibah, the donkey carrying Mary and the infant Jesus, is an embodiment of the crudeness of enacting an animal on stage, as well as a statement about the sluggishness of material form as it responds recalcitrantly to the inexorable will of God. Later on the playwright will call for the stepladders to serve as second-story windows in Our Town or the backstage crew to stand in for planets in The Skin of Our Teeth to underscore how the momentous may be couched in the ordinary. Certainly, as he says many times in his comments on the theatre, Wilder is impatient with what we might call realistic drama, because it makes what he would call the false claim of asking us to subscribe to the reality of what we see. Since so much of his work insists upon a greater truth beyond the immediate, one can understand why he’d view stage realism as a kind of heresy.

  In fact, it is Wilder’s awareness of the continual tension between the seriousness and largeness of his themes and the prosaic limitations of the medium in which they are conveyed that gives his work its special distinction. In his introductory remarks to The Alcestiad, he says he is attempting to dramatize what Kierkegaard calls “the incommensurability of things human and divine” as the mortal Alcestis and the divine Apollo strive to communicate with each other, and it is this agonizing strain which occupies so much of his other work. One can understand why Wilder was drawn to Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, where a serial killer hides himself in a conventional family in the sunny, self-congratulatory streets of a small town in California. The ordinary is a crude and sometimes misleading mask for the extraordinary in Wilder, but they work together in strange and mysterious ways. Indeed, in those works of his where there is not this contrast, where subject and style too closely reflect each other, such as The Woman of Andros or The Alcestiad, he tends to slip into the precious and artificial. He is best when he can create a daring distance between the magnitude of his theme and the ordinariness of the events which dramatize it.

  There is a famous moment in Our Town when George Gibbs’s sister Rebecca tells him about her friend’s receiving a letter which locates Grover’s Corners in “. . . the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God—that’s what it said on the envelope.” Rebecca goes on to say: “And the postman brought it just the same.” “What do you know!” says George, amazed. Wilder ends his first act on this note, which so feelingly hits home. It is a wonderfully concrete image of the interplay between the divine and the ordinary, and a human response which is both perplexed and astonished. The grand scope of his cosmic vision is modified by the specificity of the postman making his daily rounds. Many of the plays included in this volume show him struggling to find other ways to express this compelling vision.

  A. R. Gurney

  New York City

  May 1998

  PART

  I

  The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays

  THREE-MINUTE PLAYS FOR THREE PERSONS

  and

  The Marriage We Deplore

  ENORMOUSLY DISCIPLINED, experimental and industrious with his writing from an early age, Thornton Wilder could claim more than thirty publishing credits in mostly undergraduate journals by the time he graduated from college in 1920. This body of work encompassed essays, poetry, short pieces of fiction, dramatic criticism, a full-length play and, prominently in terms of numbers and thus training in playwriting, a number of three-minute playlets.

  The unprecedented success of The Bridge of San Luis Rey after 1927 triggered the appearance in October 1928 of sixteen playlets in a volume entitled The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays (Coward-McCann, New York, 1928). Of the total number, twelve were written during his college years and four written especially for The Angel publication, his first book of published drama. The publishers were understandably not shy about tying The Angel to The Bridge, a novel then selling at the rate of some ten thousand copies a week. The dust jacket copy read:

  [These plays] should prove of exceptional interest as showing the development of a talent which has astonished the critical world.

  While written to be read, Wilder’s “Three-Minute Plays” have, in fact, had a notable if largely undocumented history of informal readings and performances in churches, schools and as curtain raisers. In 1978, in a true first—described as “Producing the Unproducible”—the public television station in Madison, Wisconsin, successfully “produced” four of these playlets in a half-hour show titled “Wilder, Wilder.” In England and Germany several have also been fashioned into mini-operas.

  The Marriage We Deplore, the short play found on page 77, is an example of juvenilia from the same period as The Angel playlets, although scaled to last five minutes rather than three. It appears here for the first time.

  FOREWORD

  by Thornton Wilder

  Wilder wrote this Foreword to The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays in June 1928, soon after receiving the Pulitzer Prize for The Bridge of San Luis Rey. At the time, to devote more time to writing, he was about to step out of his life as a French teacher and as the dormitory master of Davis House at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey.

  IT IS A DISCOURAGING business to be an author at sixteen years of age. Such an author is all aspiration and no fulfillment. He is drunk on an imaginary kinship with the writers he most admires, and yet his poor overblotted notebooks show nothing to prove to others, or to himself, that the claim is justified. The shortest walk in the country is sufficient to start in his mind the theme, the plan and the title, especially the title, of a long book; and the shortest hour when he has returned to his desk is sufficient to deflate his ambition. Such fragments as he is finally able to commit to paper are a mass of echoes, awkward relative clauses and conflicting styles. In life and in literature mere sincerity is not sufficient, and in both realms the greater the capacity the longer the awkward age. Yet strange lights cross that confusion, authoritative moments that all the practice of later maturity cannot explain and cannot recapture. He is visited by great depressions and wild exhilarations, but whether his depressions proceed from his limitations in the art of living or his limitations in the art of writing he cannot tell. An artist is one who knows how life should be lived at its best and is always aware of how badly he is doing it. An artist is one who knows he is failing in living and feeds his remorse by making something fair, and a layman is one who suspects he is failing in living but is consoled by his successes in golf, or in love, or in business.

  Authors of fifteen and sixteen years of
age spend their time drawing up title pages and adjusting the tables of contents of works they have neither the perseverance nor the ability to execute. They compass easily all the parts of a book that are inessential. They compose dignified prefaces, discover happy quotations from the Latin and the French, and turn graceful dedications. This book is what is left of one of these projects.

  The title was to have been Three-Minute Plays for Three Persons. I have lately found one of my early tables of contents for it, written in the flyleaves of a First Year Algebra. Quadratics in those days could be supported only with the help of a rich marginal commentary. Usually these aids to education took the shape of a carefully planned repertory for two theatres, a large and a small. Here my longer plays were to alternate with The Wild Duck and Measure for Measure and were cast with such a roll of great names as neither money nor loyalty could assemble. The chapter on Combinations and Permutations ended short by several inches, and left me sufficient space to draw up a catalog of all the compositions I had heard of that were the work of Charles Martin Loeffler. This list of Three-Minute Plays was drawn up in Berkeley, California, in the spring of 1915. It contains several that have since been rejected, two that are in the present volume, Brother Fire and Proserpina and the Devil, and the names of many that were unwritten then and that still, through the charm of their titles, ask to be written.

  Since then I have composed some forty of these plays, for I had discovered a literary form that satisfied my passion for compression. Since the time when I began to read I had become aware of the needless repetition, the complacency in most writing. Who does not know the empty opening paragraphs, the deft but uninstructive transitions, and the closing paragraphs that summarize a work and which are unnecessary to an alert reader?

  Moreover, their brevity flatters my inability to sustain a long flight, and the inertia that barely permits me to write at all. And finally, when I became a teacher, here was the length that could be compassed after the lights of the House were out and the sheaf of absurd French exercises corrected and indignantly marked with red crayon. In time the three minutes and the three persons became a habit, and no idea was too grandiose—as the reader will see—for me to try and invest it in this strange discipline.

  There were other plans for this book. There was to have been a series of Footnotes to Biographies, suggested by Herbert Eulenberg’s Schattenbilder, represented here by the Mozart [Mozart and the Gray Steward], the Ibsen [Centaurs], and the St. Francis play [Brother Fire]. There were hopes of a still more difficult series. Dürer’s two sets of woodcuts illustrating the Passion were to serve as model for a series of plays that would be meditations on the last days of Our Lord. Two of them are in this book [Now the Servant’s Name Was Malchus, Hast Thou Considered My Servant Job?]. There was to have been a series illustrating the history of the stage, and again, two of them are in this book [Fanny Otcott, Centaurs]. How different the practice of writing would be if one did not permit oneself to be pretentious. Some hands have no choice: they would rather fail with an oratorio than succeed with a ballad.

  During the years that these plays were being written I was reading widely, and these pages are full of allusions to it. The art of literature springs from two curiosities, a curiosity about human beings pushed to such an extreme that it resembles love, and a love of a few masterpieces of literature so absorbing that it has all the richest elements of curiosity. I use the word curiosity in the French sense of a tireless awareness of things. (It is too late to arrest the deterioration of our greatest English words. We live in an age where pity and charity have taken on the color of condescension; where humility seems to mean an acknowledgment of failure; where simplicity is foolishness and curiosity is interference. Today hope, and faith itself, imply a deliberate self-deception.) The training for literature must be acquired by the artist alone, through the passionate assimilation of a few masterpieces written from a spirit somewhat like his own, and of a few masterpieces written from a spirit not at all like his own. I read all Newman, and then I read all Swift. The technical processes of literature should be acquired almost unconsciously on the tide of a great enthusiasm, even syntax, even sentence construction; I should like to hope, even spelling. I am thinking of some words of Renan commenting in the Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse upon his education:

  Pour moi, (je) crois que la meilleure manière de former des jeunes gens de talent est de ne jamais leur parler de talent ni de style, mais de les instruire et d’exciter fortement leur esprit sur les questions philosophiques, religieuses, politiques, sociales, scientifiques, historiques; en un mot, de procéder par l’enseignement du fond des choses, et non par l’enseignement d’une creuse rhétorique.

  The last four plays here [Mozart and the Gray Steward, Hast Thou Considered My Servant Job?, The Flight into Egypt, The Angel That Troubled the Waters] have been written within a year and a half. Almost all the plays in this book are religious, but religious in that dilute fashion that is a believer’s concession to a contemporary standard of good manners. But these four plant their flag as boldly as they may. It is the kind of work that I would most like to do well, in spite of the fact that there has seldom been an age in literature when such a vein was less welcome and less understood. I hope, through many mistakes, to discover the spirit that is not unequal to the elevation of the great religious themes, yet which does not fall into a repellent didacticism. Didacticism is an attempt at the coercion of another’s free mind, even though one knows that in these matters beyond logic, beauty is the only persuasion. Here the schoolmaster enters again. He sees all that is fairest in the Christian tradition made repugnant to the new generations by reason of the diction in which it is expressed. The intermittent sincerity of generations of clergymen and teachers has rendered embarrassing and even ridiculous all the terms of the spiritual life. Nothing succeeds in dampening the aspirations of the young today—who dares use the word “aspiration” without enclosing it, knowingly, in quotation marks?—like the names they hear given to them. The revival of religion is almost a matter of rhetoric. The work is difficult, perhaps impossible (perhaps all religions die out with the exhaustion of the language), but it at least reminds us that Our Lord asked us in His work to be not only as gentle as doves, but as wise as serpents.

  Thornton Wilder

  The Davis House

  Lawrenceville, NJ

  June 1928

  Nascuntur Poetae . . .

  CHARACTERS

  THE WOMAN IN THE CHLAMYS

  THE BOY

  THE WOMAN IN DEEP RED

  SETTING

  A painting of Piero di Cosimo.

  We are gazing into some strange incomprehensible painting of Piero di Cosimo—a world of pale blues and greens, of abrupt peaks in agate and of walled cities, of flying red stags with hounds at their throats, and of lions in tears beside their crowns. On the roads are seen traveling companies, in no haste and often lost in contemplation of the sky. A boy sits on a rock in the foreground. He is listening to the words of a woman dressed in a chlamys that takes on the color of the objects about her.

  THE WOMAN IN THE CHLAMYS: In a far valley, boy, sit those who in their lifetime have possessed some special gift of eye or ear or finger. There they sit apart, choosing their successors. And when on the winds toward birth the souls of those about to live are borne past them, they choose the brighter spirits that cry along that wind. And you were chosen.

  THE BOY: For what gift, lady, did the choice fall? Am I to mould in clay, or paint? Shall I sing or mime, lady? What choice fell on me and from what master?

  THE WOMAN IN THE CHLAMYS: It is enough to know that you were chosen.

  THE BOY: What further remains to be done? You have poured on my eyes and ears and mouth the divine ointment; you have laid on my tongue the burning ember. Why do we delay?

  THE WOMAN IN THE CHLAMYS: Be not so eager for life. Too soon you will be shaken by breath; too soon and too long you will be tossed in the tumult of the senses.

&nb
sp; THE BOY: I am not afraid of life. I will astonish it. —Why are we delaying?

  THE WOMAN IN THE CHLAMYS: My sister is coming now. Listen to her.

  (The Woman in the Chlamys withdraws and gives place to her sister, whose feet stir not the shells upon the path. She wears a robe of deep and noble red and bears in her hands a long golden chain hung about with pendants. Her face is fixed in concentration and compassion, like the face of one taking part in a sacrifice of great moment.)

  THE BOY: All is ready. What do you come to do?

  THE WOMAN IN DEEP RED: My sister has given you the gifts of pride and of joy. But those are not all.

  THE BOY: What gifts remain? I have been chosen. I am ready.

  THE WOMAN IN DEEP RED: Those gifts are vain without these. He who carries much gold stumbles. I bring the dark and necessary gifts. This golden chain . . .

  THE BOY (With mounting fear): Your face is shadowed. Draw back; take back all the gifts, if I must accept these also.