The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume II
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4.The passage was in metric speech. All poetry is an “agreed-upon falsehood” in regard to speech.
5.The lines were sung in a kind of recitative. All opera involves this “permitted lie” in regard to speech.
Modern taste would say that the passage would convey much greater pathos if a woman “like Medea” had delivered it—with an uncovered face that exhibited all the emotions she was undergoing. For the Greeks, however, there was no pretense that Medea was on the stage. The mask, the costume, the mode of declamation were a series of signs which the spectator interpreted and reassembled in his own mind. Medea was being re-created within the imagination of each of the spectators.
The history of the theatre shows us that in its greatest ages the stage employed the greatest number of conventions. The stage is fundamental pretense and it thrives on the acceptance of that fact and in the multiplication of additional pretenses. When it tries to assert that the personages in the action “really are,” really inhabit such and such rooms, really suffer such and such emotions, it loses rather than gains credibility. The modern world is inclined to laugh condescendingly at the fact that in the plays of Racine and Corneille the gods and heroes of antiquity were dressed like the courtiers under Louis XIV; that in the Elizabethan Age scenery was replaced by placards notifying the audience of the location; and that a whip in the hand and a jogging motion of the body indicated that a man was on horseback in the Chinese theatre; these devices did not spring from naïveté, however, but from the vitality of the public imagination in those days and from an instinctive feeling as to where the essential and where the inessential lay in drama.
The convention has two functions:
1.It provokes the collaborative activity of the spectator’s imagination; and
2.It raises the action from the specific to the general.
This second aspect is of even greater importance than the first.
If Juliet is represented as a girl “very like Juliet”—it was not merely a deference to contemporary prejudices that assigned this role to a boy in the Elizabethan Age—moving about in a “real” house with marble staircases, rugs, lamps, and furniture, the impression is irresistibly conveyed that these events happened to this one girl, in one place, at one moment in time. When the play is staged as Shakespeare intended it, the bareness of the stage releases the events from the particular and the experience of Juliet partakes of that of all girls in love, in every time, place and language.
The stage continually strains to tell this generalized truth and it is the element of pretense that reinforces it. Out of the lie, the pretense, of the theatre proceeds a truth more compelling than the novel can attain, for the novel by its own laws is constrained to tell of an action that “once happened”—“once upon a time.”
IV
THE ACTION ON THE STAGE TAKES PLACE IN PERPETUAL PRESENT TIME
Novels are written in the past tense. The characters in them, it is true, are represented as living moment by moment their present time, but the constant running commentary of the novelist (“Tess slowly descended into the valley”; “Anna Karenina laughed”) inevitably conveys to the reader the fact that these events are long since past and over.
The novel is a past reported in the present. On the stage it is always now. This confers upon the action an increased vitality which the novelist longs in vain to incorporate into his work.
This condition in the theatre brings with it another important element:
In the theatre we are not aware of the intervening storyteller. The speeches arise from the characters in an apparently pure spontaneity.
A play is what takes place.
A novel is what one person tells us took place.
A play visibly represents pure existing. A novel is what one mind, claiming to omniscience, asserts to have existed.
Many dramatists have regretted this absence of the narrator from the stage, with his point of view, his powers of analyzing the behavior of the characters, his ability to interfere and supply further facts about the past, about simultaneous actions not visible on the stage, and, above all, his function of pointing the moral and emphasizing the significance of the action. In some periods of the theatre he has been present as chorus, or prologue and epilogue, or as raisonneur. But surely this absence constitutes an additional force to the form, as well as an additional tax upon the writer’s skill. It is the task of the dramatist so to coordinate his play, through the selection of episodes and speeches, that though he is himself not visible, his point of view and his governing intention will impose themselves on the spectator’s attention, not as dogmatic assertion or motto, but as self-evident truth and inevitable deduction.
Imaginative narration—the invention of souls and destinies—is to a philosopher an all but indefensible activity.
Its justification lies in the fact that the communication of ideas from one mind to another inevitably reaches the point where exposition passes into illustration, into parable, metaphor, allegory and myth.
It is no accident that when Plato arrived at the height of his argument and attempted to convey a theory of knowledge and a theory of the structure of man’s nature, he passed over into storytelling, into the myths of the Cave and the Charioteer; and that the great religious teachers have constantly had recourse to the parable as a means of imparting their deepest intuitions.
The theatre offers to imaginative narration its highest possibilities. It has many pitfalls and its very vitality betrays it into service as mere diversion and the enhancement of significant matter; but it is well to remember that it was the theatre that rose to the highest place during those epochs that aftertime has chosen to call “great ages” and that the Athens of Pericles and the reigns of Elizabeth I, Philip II and Louis XIV were also the ages that gave to the world the greatest dramas it has known.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC AND PRODUCTION NOTES
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. First published 29 October 1928 in New York by Coward-McCann in a limited and author-signed edition of 750 copies and trade edition of 2,000 copies numbered and signed by the publishers. Also published in England (1928) and Germany (1954). Of the sixteen plays in this collection, twelve were first published as follows: Nascuntur Poetae . . . (as The Walled City) in Yale Literary Magazine (hereafter called YLM), New Haven, CT (Mar. 1918) 305–08; Proserpina and the Devil in Oberlin Literary Magazine (hereafter OLM), Oberlin, OH (Dec. 1916) 50–51; Fanny Otcott (as That Other Fanny Otcott) in YLM (Apr. 1918) 328–31; Brother Fire (as Brother Fire: A Comedy for Saints) in OLM (May 1916) 200–02; The Penny That Beauty Spent in YLM (Mar. 1918) 303–05; The Angel on the Ship in YLM (Oct. 1917) 15–17, and reprinted and revised as the first of “Two Plays,” in Harper’s Magazine, New York (Oct. 1928) 564–65; The Message and Jehanne in YLM (Nov. 1917) 94–96, and reprinted and revised in Theatre Guild Magazine (Oct. 1928) 13–15; Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came in YLM (June 1919) 238–40; Centaurs (as The Death of the Centaur: A Footnote to Ibsen) in S 4 N, Northampton, MA (Apr. 1920) 8–12; Leviathan (as Not for Leviathan) in YLM (Apr. 1919) 160–63; And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead in S 4 N (Jan./Feb. 1923) 9–13; Mozart and the Gray Steward, as the second of “Two Plays” in Harper’s Magazine (Oct. 1928) 565–67.
Under the banners of “Wilder, Wilder” and “Producing the Unproducible,” WHA-TV Public Television in Madison, Wisconsin, joined with the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Theatre and Milwaukee Repertory Theater to air four of the plays—The Penny That Beauty Spent, And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead, Now the Servant’s Name Was Malchus and The Flight into Egypt—on 21 March 1978.
The Marriage We Deplore. First printed here from the author’s typescript/manuscript dated in his hand “June 10, [19]17,” in the Thornton Wilder Archive of the Yale
Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (hereafter TWYCAL). Shown elsewhere as “Number 1” of a projected series of “Five-Minute Playlets for Five Persons” but for which no other plays exist or have survived.
PART II
THE UNERRING INSTINCT
“The Unerring Instinct: A Play in One Act.” Written for the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) and first published in duplicated form in January 1948 in New York by the Conference as one of its “NCCJ Scripts for Brotherhood.” Distributed free to schools and dramatic clubs throughout the country and reproduction allowed “without permission except no radio performances may be given in 1948, and that credit be given to the National Conference of Christians and Jews and to Mr. Wilder.”
PART III
“THE EMPORIUM”
Two scenes from an uncompleted play, “The Emporium.” First published from the TWYCAL in November 1985 as Appendix I in The Journals of Thornton Wilder: 1939—1961, selected and edited by Donald Gallup, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1985, 297–314.
“Notes Toward the Emporium.” First printed from the TWYCAL as Appendix II in The Journals of Thornton Wilder: 1939–1961, selected and edited by Donald Gallup, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1985, 315–336.
Readers interested in learning more about the writing of the “The Emporium” should refer to a number of other notes in The Journals.
PART IV
THE ALCESTIAD
With Its Satyr Play
THE DRUNKEN SISTERS
The Alcestiad (as Die Alkestiade). First published in German translation by Herberth E. Herlitschka on 10 April 1960 by S. Fischer Verlag in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in an edition of 40,000 copies. This edition, including the satyr play The Drunken Sisters (Die Beschwipsten Schwestern), also translated by Herberth E. Herlitschka, has sold approximately 60,000 copies. The English text, edited by Donald Gallup from German and English sources with Foreword by Isabel Wilder, was published 16 November 1977 by Harper & Row, New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco & London with the title The Alcestiad or A Life in the Sun: A Play in Three Acts—With a Satyr Play: The Drunken Sisters, in an edition of some 5,000 copies. Subsequent editions include Avon Books (1979) and The Franklin Library (1977). An acting edition with revised introduction by Isabel Wilder was published March 1980 by Samuel French, Inc., New York, Hollywood, London and Toronto (hereafter SF).
This play, directed by Tyrone Guthrie, had its world premier with the title A Life in the Sun at The Church of Scotland Assembly Hall, The Mound, Edinburgh, on 22 August 1955. It was produced by the Edinburgh Festival Society in association with Tennent Productions Limited, and was directed by Tyrone Guthrie, with décor by Tanya Moiseiwitsch, and Irene Worth in the role of Alcestis. The first performance in the German language occurred on 27 June 1957 in the Schauspielhaus in Zurich, Switzerland. This production, including the satyr play The Drunken Sisters for the first time, was directed by Leopold Lindtberg with Maria Becker in the role of Alcestis. The play was produced professionally in Germany, Switzerland and Austria twenty-one times between 1957 and 1961, and ten times since. The U.S. premier, directed by Kent Paul, occurred on 21 July 1978 at the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Santa Maria, California. The first U.S. professional production, directed by Vincent Dowling, occurred on 25 August 1984 in Cleveland at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival (with the title Alcestis and Apollo). In November 1986, John Reich directed the University of Wisconsin-Madison Theatre’s production, “a tribute to its native son” (Thornton Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin on 17 April 1897). On 12 January 1998, The Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation sponsored a Concert Reading in New York City directed by Robert Kalfin and read by professional actors. The play is performed occasionally by amateurs.
The opera version of The Alcestiad, with libretto by Wilder and music composed by Louise Talma (1906–1996), was published in 1978 by Carl Fischer as The Alcestiad: An Opera in Three Acts. The opera had its world premier in German translation, prepared by Herberth E. Herlitschka, on 2 March 1962, at the Frankfurt Opera House, Frankfurt am Main. The production was directed by Harry Buckwitz with Inge Borkh in the role of Alcestis. This was the first opera by an American woman to be produced by a major European opera house. It was first performed in English in this country (in excerpts) on 3 April 1976, at the Yale School of Music with Phyllis Curtin singing Alcestis. Inquiries about this work may be directed to Carl Fischer, Inc., 62 Cooper Square, New York, NY 10003.
For additional details about Wilder’s last play, see Martin Blank, “The Alcestiad: The Play and Opera” in Critical Essays on Thornton Wilder, edited by Martin Blank, G. K. Hall & Co., New York, 1996, 88–98. For a discussion of Wilder’s reception by critics with attention to the sources of his popularity in Germany, and a selected German bibliography, see Amos N. Wilder, Thornton Wilder and His Public, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1980.
The Drunken Sisters. First printed in the Atlantic Monthly, CC.5 (Nov. 1957) 92–95. A revised text was published in The Alcestiad or A Life in the Sun: A Play in Three Acts—With a Satyr Play: The Drunken Sisters by Harper & Row, New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London, in 1977. SF acting edition published in 1978. The play was published in The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder: Volume I, by Theatre Communications Group, New York, 1997.