The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume II

by Thornton Wilder

  Soon after Pearl Harbor Thornton was commissioned a captain in the Air Force. By strange coincidence his final leave before going overseas came at the time of the previews and opening of The Skin of Our Teeth in New York. The morning that Mother and I said good-bye to him he patted his bulging duffle bag: “I have the manuscript of The Alcestiad in my kit. I’ve been thinking how I could make it into a good one-act. It’s very possible by using just the big second act scene. I’d like to leave a finished piece of work . . . might come in handy, Mother. It’s a toss-up if The Skin of Our Teeth will catch on . . .”

  Two years later, while he was waiting in a camp near Boston to be separated from the Air Force (a lieutenant colonel now), his papers were lost. The commanding officer of the post offered a three-day pass. Thornton went straight from the Back Bay station to the Boston Public Library on Copley Square, where he drowned himself once more in the Golden Age of Greece. A few days later he was for the first time in more than three years seated at his own desk in Hamden, Connecticut.

  A single sheet of paper from that time is before me now. Printed on one side in big block letters is:

  THE ALCESTIAD

  A PLAY OF QUESTIONS

  On the reverse in his small careful penmanship is:

  (Sketches up to and including the Teiresias scene of Act I had been made before the War and lost)

  Draft One of the first act, May and July 1945

  Draft Two, begun July 8, 1945

  This Draft Three begun (after completion of Act II and half of Act III) on Dec

  The unfinished date would be 1945.

  The loss of the manuscript meant more to my brother than these few notes convey; his eagerness to get back to his peacetime profession fired his enthusiasm and carried him along for the seven months of work recorded here. But, like millions of other soldiers, he had returned home not only a disoriented and exhausted man but a changed one. He was not able easily to recapture his prewar vision of Alcestis and he did not have the reserve of physical and nervous energy to sustain the excitement and tension to finish his work. He found he was beginning to destroy rather than build. Fortunately he recognized this and put the manuscript away again before doing it injury.

  Ancient literature is replete with warriors and battlefields, tyrants and heroes. My brother’s thoughts were still lively with his own recent experiences of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s wars: one year spent on the North African coast among the ruins and ghosts of Hellenic and Roman conquest; another year in southern Italy, likewise haunted by dramatic legend, with Caesar’s image triumphant. Thornton suddenly saw his next work plain. And so it happened that the novel The Ides of March was written and published in 1947. It opened the way for his return to civilian life, to teaching and lecturing again, to the theatre and to Alcestis.

  Thornton was only one of many authors after Euripides to be inspired to retell in his own way the Alcestis fable. Among others Christoph Martin Wieland in Germany in 1773 wrote a libretto for an operetta on the subject. In the next century the poets Richard von Hofmannstahl in Austria and Robert Browning in England used the myth. T. S. Eliot borrowed from it for an aspect of his successful play, The Cocktail Party. And no wonder, for the theme of conjugal love and the willingness of a wife to die for her husband is an appealing and thought-provoking challenge to any author eager to explore and praise the capabilities of humankind.

  After the success at the 1954 Edinburgh Festival of The Matchmaker—that happy invention which started its career as the New York failure The Merchant of Yonkers and went on to become the basis of the musical comedy hit Hello, Dolly!—the producers commissioned from my brother a new play for the next season. This gave him the impetus needed to finish The Alcestiad. He went into hiding at Aixen-Provence for a long working period. At Christmas he joined a group of friends and me at Villars, Switzerland, for two weeks. During that time I typed from the manuscript the first two acts of the new text. He submitted them at once to the Festival Committee. They and Tyrone Guthrie accepted the play for their 1955 program. Before leaving Aix in the spring he sent in Act III.

  A performance of the Classic Attic theatre consisted of a trilogy of more or less connected tragedies usually followed by a Satyr Play—a humorous or biting comment using characters and situations from the preceding dramas. Euripides, the youngest of the three major rival playwrights, sometimes broke with tradition by writing a single play that could stand alone or be grouped with others to complete the three-part pattern. His Alcestis is one of these. In fact, because of its “happy ending,” with the heroine brought back from the underworld by Hercules, Alcestis was even used occasionally as a Satyr Play.

  My brother’s first idea for his version of the story was to commission a new translation of Euripides’s text for a middle act and write a first and third to frame it. Soon he discarded the plan as not practical for his purposes.

  In the Greek telling of the legend and Bulfinch’s account centuries later, King Admetus knows that he can be saved from death if another will die for him. He goes begging the favor among his servants, former military colleagues, and friends to no avail. Next, he beseeches his parents relentlessly, pointing out that since they have so few years of living left, it is a little thing to ask. But neither the old father nor the old mother is willing to give up a breath for the son. The king does not request this sacrifice of his queen; when Alcestis offers her life with all her love his protests seem mild and unworthy.

  Thornton, by having Admetus unaware that he can be saved by another’s death, gains a very dramatic and human emotional peak in Act II, and deepens the characterizations and relationship of husband and wife, enriching the bare outlines of the legend for our twentieth century understanding. Concerning his version my brother has said:

  On one level my play recounts the life of a woman—of many women—from bewildered bride to sorely tested wife to overburdened old age. On another level it is a wildly romantic story of gods and men, of death and hell, of resurrection of great loves and great trials, of usurpation and revenge. On another level, however, it is a comedy . . . about the extreme difficulty of any dialogue between heaven and earth, about the misunderstandings that result from the incommensurability of things human and divine.*

  Of Thornton’s other works, his third novel, The Woman of Andros, published in 1930, comes closest in setting, feeling and ideas to The Alcestiad. Laid on a small Grecian island when Alcestis was already a legend, it is a nostalgic, quiet yet passionate prose-poem, a bridge with one end mired in the mud of the cruel pagan world, the other straining toward a slowly rising dawn of release. The heroine, Chrysis, is beautiful, intelligent and has some education, but her profession as a heitara makes her an outcast. Nevertheless, she is spiritual sister to the Queen Alcestis.

  In both these female characters Thornton pays his hommage to all women, giving them the burden of carrying his message. Chrysis in her living and her dying praises all life—“the bright and the dark”—and teaches others to do likewise. She is unknowingly a prophet, pointing ahead to a higher hope for humanity.

  Alcestis, of course, had been entrusted with messages and heaped with laurel wreaths long before Thornton heard her name. In his play, brought back from hell to live again in the Golden Light of Apollo, she is not permitted a human end. The God steals her from Death and insists upon her perpetual life. He steals her from Admetus, thus denying her—and the king—a stela at his side in the royal tomb. Apollo leads her to His Evergreen Grove where she still wanders, a symbol, a myth, a truth for us all: one who escaped from darkness to be herself a light on the horizon comprehensible to the spirit of Christian humanism.

  A play written in the form of ancient Greek drama should logically be performed in the traditional classic manner, in a setting of marble columns under a sun-lighted blue sky. Thornton wrote his Alcestiad so that it could be accommodated to the conventional theatre of the proscenium arch. At Edinburgh it was presented under still other circumstances, in the vast barn of a build
ing known as The Church of Scotland Assembly Hall, box-shaped with rows and rows of uncomfortable seats facing three directions—a perfect setting for stormy sessions of factions warring over church politics and church dogma.

  In this uncongenial place the simple storytelling script of The Alcestiad had to be blown up to near-pageantry proportions. There were not the words to cover the added action and the crowd scenes that filled the stage and trailed down the aisles under Tyrone Guthrie’s exciting but over-dramatic direction. Good or bad the play was nearly lost.

  Even the title was changed to A Life in the Sun, which the management thought would have “more box-office appeal.” Thornton refers to this in a letter from Scotland to our brother Amos in Cambridge, Massachusetts:

  That’s The Alcestiad, but the entrepreneurs hate that for a title . . . A Life in the Sun is a pretty cheery title for a play fraught with dire events, but it says that Alcestis’s life is rooted in Apollo and there’s a deal about his being the Sun, so there you are . . .

  There were compensations for Thornton. He was not one to despair, nor even fret long. Guthrie’s extraordinary talents lighted up some passages, the rare Irene Worth headed a strong cast, and most of the public seated in those uncomfortable rows were gratifyingly responsive and definite in their approval, although the critics, as they do more often than not, veered from appreciative interest and understanding to omniscient disdain.

  Most important of all, the author saw his work as a living whole in three-dimensional form. He learned what he had or had not accomplished to his own satisfaction. He also received balm for having felt betrayed by The Church of Scotland Assembly Hall when Tyrone Guthrie very magnanimously confided to him, “I did not serve your play well.”

  There was much interest among theatrical producers in this country and elsewhere in obtaining the rights for a New York production. My brother had his own ideas as to what changes he wished to make in the text. He talked with a number of directors and listened to their suggestions. He began working on revisions. This always was difficult for him; he was at his best living in the present and looking into the future. Too many people were giving him advice, crowding him. “I need a longer perspective,” he told them. He withdrew the script from circulation, refusing acting rights to those who were willing to try it out as it stood.

  When he was released from the unaccustomed pressure, fresh ideas began to come to him for both The Alcestiad and the Satyr Play he wanted to go with it in the proper tradition of Greek dramaturgy. He was soon enthralled with The Drunken Sisters. It was one of those works that the writer—or composer in any medium—experiences occasionally. It “came” to him all at once on a single direct line, unfolding from beginning to end. Few changes had to be made in the original manuscript for its appearance in the Atlantic Monthly in 1957.

  With The Drunken Sisters demanding to be heard and seen on a stage, it was not difficult for my brother to be persuaded to sign a contract for the two plays to be presented at the Schauspielhaus in Zurich, Switzerland. It was in this theatre during the Second World War that Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth had had their first European presentations; many of the most distinguished German and Austrian regisseurs and actors and actresses had sought refuge in Switzerland, and Thornton’s works, fiction as well as drama, were well known to them and held in high regard.

  Thornton worked with the translator, Herberth E. Herlitschka, a Viennese who had translated much of his earlier work into the German language. The revisions made at this time from the text performed at Edinburgh were not great, as he wanted to see the same play interpreted by another director and another cast. It was an exciting and stunning production in every way, the kind of evening in the theatre that has the audience alert, arguing between the acts, clapping hard at the curtains and leaving the theatre full of life.

  The Zurich opening was followed by full-scale productions in most of the state-endowed theatres in the large and small cities throughout Germany. It was presented also at the Burg Theater in Vienna. During this period, Thornton made further revisions and, responding to the great demand in Germany, permitted publication of a German edition, by Fischer Verlag, in 1960.

  The play was discussed in the literary sections of newspapers and magazines and in scholarly journals and books. Käte Hamburger, in her volume on classical figures in modern literature, From Sophocles to Sartre, wrote:

  Wilder’s work is the most significant interpretation of the [Alcestis] theme in modern world literature.†

  Though Thornton did not continue to work on The Alcestiad as a playscript in English, he could not let it go. It seemed inevitable that when he started searching for a subject for an opera libretto for Louise Talma, whose musical compositions he admired greatly, the circle would be completed.

  The opera, also entitled The Alcestiad, was six years in the making. It opened in the splendid, rebuilt opera house of Frankfurt, Germany, on March 2, 1962. It is opera on a grand scale requiring a large stage, a large orchestra, a large cast. The production, backed with a subsidy, was given all these elements, and Inge Borkh was a superb Alcestis. The final curtain came down to storybook, thunderous applause and cries of “bravo.” There were over thirty curtain calls. Miss Talma, Thornton, everybody were called and recalled to take bows. The rejoicing was great at the dinner party after the performance. Yet the critics’ reviews during the next few days and later in the weekly journals were very mixed. One veiled but definite complaint that came through in the most unsympathetic was that women should not write operas, another that the music was too modern.

  For his part Thornton was completely satisfied with the score, and felt that any fault in the work came from his inexperience as a librettist. The opera has since been given in concert form, and arias from it have been sung in various recitals. Thornton never doubted that it was a work ahead of its time and would one day find full recognition.

  Though my brother began writing early in life his list of accomplishments is not long: seven novels; some telling essays and introductions to books—his own and others; two volumes of short plays and four major long ones, counting The Merchant of Yonkers and The Matchmaker as one. In his work he was not afraid to repeat himself or to be influenced by the masters in the tradition of literature who had passed the torch from hand to hand. Of his theatre pieces he wrote in the preface to the collected Three Plays (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1957):

  I am not one of the new dramatists we are looking for. I wish I were. I hope I have played a part in preparing the way for them. I am not an innovator but a re-discoverer of forgotten goods and I hope a remover of obtrusive bric-a-brac.

  But he experimented with form. He dared to play with chronological time, historical time, and literary time, plucking events from history, people from pedestals and picture frames, and characters from hallowed printed pages. He gave voice to death, angels, pagan gods, and animals.

  In the Foreword to his collection of “three-minute” plays for reading, The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays (Coward-McCann, New York, 1928), my brother wrote of the problems of a young writer (he knew, for he had written some of these plays while he was still in his teens). He described moments of elation and discouragement, and the possibilities:

  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.

  Thornton always believed firmly that a wastebasket was a writer’s best friend. Even so, his extant papers give evidence of some of his own failed oratorios, including the first two acts—the third was never written—of The Emporium, a play set in the largest, most alluring store in the world, where you can find everything you need or think you want, and The Melting Pot, an unfinished scenario for an epic film on the growth of our country told through the lives of generations of people. But although he did not himself take time from other projects to revise the English text of The Alcestiad to agree with what he
had authorized for publication in German, and would doubtless have made further revisions, the play as printed is no failed oratorio. It is a work that reflects successfully some of his most abiding convictions about the verities of human experience.

  Thornton Wilder’s tapestry is finished. With the publication of The Alcestiad with The Drunken Sisters and the telling of its story, the final design comes clear, revealing all that he did with his portion of the alphabet, with his talents, with the years given to him and, most of all, with what he believed and tried to share. Now that the last length of Alcestis’s huge ball of yarn has been unwound and the last stitch knotted there are no further mysteries on the subject to be guarded at Delphi.

  Isabel Wilder

  Martha’s Vineyard

  July 1977

  *[Wilder’s sixth novel, which was published in 1967 and received the National Book Award.]

  *[Wilder periodically taught courses in writing, and the Classics in Translation at the University of Chicago during the 1930s.]

  *[See page 167 for the complete text of Wilder’s program note for the Edinburgh production of The Alcestiad.]

  †Ungar, New York, 1969. Translation of Von Sophokles zu Sartre, Griechische Dramenfiguren Antik und Modern, Stuttgart, 1962.

  NOTES ON THE ALCESTIAD

  by Thornton Wilder

  With “box office appeal” in mind, The Alcestiad opened in Edinburgh with the name “A Place in the Sun.” To further explain a play that seemed to stand on the other side of the world from a farce like The Matchmaker, Tyrone Guthrie prevailed on Wilder to write a note for the program. In it, Wilder highlights the influence of existentialism on the play, especially the contribution of Søren Kierkegaard. To his family in the same period, he put it differently: “It’s a mixture of religious revival, mother-love-dynamite, and heroic daring-do. You can’t beat that combination.”