According to the (EdTA) website, the Thespian Festival features more than fifty productions presented by schools from throughout North America and abroad, and draws over 2200 high school thespians, teachers and high school administrators. Plus: a full schedule of workshops presented by theatre professionals, individual performance events, a student playwriting program, and opportunities to audition for college and university representatives. While about a quarter of the attending schools bring shows to share with their peers, many Thespian troupes have a great Festival experience without performing. There are no screening or qualification requirements to attend.

The cast and director of Pullman Car Hiawatha, from the Northern Marianas Islands in the Western Pacific, were photographed by representatives from Samuel French following their performance.

Robert MacNeil, Photo by Don Perdue

The Thornton Wilder Prize honors that individual who, in the opinion of the Board, practices his or her calling with the distinction, devotion and zest that characterized the artist for whom the prize is named. The Thornton Wilder Prize was established in 2008 with a donation from June Trolley, a friend of Mr. Wilder‟s. The Prize was first awarded to novelist Russell Banks at the "Wilder in the Twenty-first Century: The First International Thornton Wilder Conference," held at The College of New Jersey in Ewing, NJ in October 2008.

Robert MacNeil was a journalist for forty years with, successively, Reuters News Agency, NBC News and the BBC, culminating as executive editor and co-anchor of "The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour," a 20-year nightly partnership with Jim Lehrer on PBS. He is the author of three novels, Burden of Desire, The Voyage and Breaking News; three memoirs, The Right Place at the Right Time, Wordstruck, and Looking For My Country; and co-author of The Story of English and the sequel, Do You Speak American? Since 1993 he has been Chairman of the MacDowell Colony. He and his wife Donna live in New York City.

In announcing the award, Tappan Wilder stated, "The Thornton Wilder Society and I are so pleased to honor our friend and colleague, Robert MacNeil, with the Thornton Wilder prize."

The Thornton Wilder Society has the twofold purpose of supporting efforts which expand the literary legacy of Thornton Wilder and of encouraging projects which emphasize the timeless importance of literature and drama to world culture. The Thornton Wilder Society appeals to anyone who has an interest in the life and works of Thornton Wilder. The Society is international in its scope, attracting Wilder fans, scholars, critics, educators and theatrical professionals and amateurs from all over the world. The Society, in short, is of interest to all who love Wilder, his work, and his belief in the importance of art as a sustaining influence in the world.

Now in its second record-breaking year, the critically acclaimed David Cromer production of‟ Thornton Wilder‟s Our Town, began performances on February 17, 2009, with an official opening night on February 26, 2009 where it received rave reviews at the Barrow Street Theatre (27 Barrow Street).

The complete cast of Our Town includes (in alphabetical order) Elizabeth Audley as Mrs. Soames, Robert Beitzel as Howie Newsome, Kati Brazda as Mrs. Webb, Will Brill as Joe Crowell, Nathan Dame as Sam Craig, Roger DeWitt as Joe Stoddard, Mark Hatton as Constable Warren, Emma Galvin as Rebecca Gibbs, Jennifer Grace as Emily, Wilbur Edwin Henry as Professor Willard, Seamus Mulcahy as Wally Webb, Ben Livingston as Doc Gibbs, David Manis as Editor Webb, Jonathan Maestro as Simon Stimson, James McMenamin as George, Lori Myers as Mrs. Gibbs, Michael Shannon as the „Stage Manager‟, and Jason Yachanin as Si Crowell with Dana Jacks, Lynn Laurence, Kathleen Peirce, Keith Perry, and Mark Shock.

The New York production of Our Town went on to win the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Production and Outstanding Direction and Obie Award for Outstanding Director. This current staging of Our Town entered its second year on February 26th and became the longest-running production of the play in its 72-year history with its record-breaking 337th performance on December 16, 2009.

Our Town is produced by Scott Morfee, Jean Doumanian, Tom Wirtshafter, Ted Snowdon, Eagle Productions, Dena Hammerstein/Pam Pariseau, The Weinstein Company, and Burnt Umber Productions.
The performance schedule is as follows: Tuesday - Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 p.m. & 7:30 p.m., Sunday at 2:30 p.m. & 7:30 p.m. Tickets are priced at $69 & $49.50 and are available through SmartTix (212) 868-4444, www.smarttix.com, or at the Barrow Street Theatre box office (open at 1 p.m. daily). Student tickets at $20 are available on the day of performance only at the box office. Tickets now on sale through June 27, 2010.

Barrow Street Theatre is located at 27 Barrow Street at 7th Avenue South in the heart of Greenwich Village. Nearby subway stops are the 1 at Christopher Street (walk 1 block South on 7th Avenue to Barrow) and the A, C, E, B, D, F and V at West 4th (walk West on 4th Street, left on Barrow).

Off to the Y after the matinee, then met Mimi and husband Sam, now back from his trip. They live frugally, keeping very accurate accounts of every penny spent, rigorously checking the gas mileage on the car, itemizing stamps used, phone calls made. I couldn't live this way. It's an attitude toward money I don't much care for. And the fact that Sam has apparently cashed in his stocks and bonds - gifts from his mother - to give to the Baha'i Faith so they can construct temples, makes no sense to me. So home to bed. The atmosphere isn't the same with Sam around. So ends my stay in Boston. On to New Haven

20 December, 1953 - New Haven

At the New Haven station I watched Hodiak ogle a tiny baby while its parents ogled him. He was pretty drunk, looking inane and slack-lipped with his pork-pie hat perched atop his crewcut. Ainsley and Jimbum were solicitously standing guard. And Huffman in his navy coat a size too large, looking forlorn and vaguely Japanese.

On the train down, Mr. Crawford carried his latest camp-follower along with his luggage. One Mady Roy, a girl he unearthed in Boston. Attractive, dark, with her hair worn in a carefully arranged bun. Crawford is playing Svengali again and to the hilt. The two of them stood in the frigid air outside the station waiting for a cab, their faces very close, eyes locked, their steamy breath intermingling.

Getting Hodiak and his palace guard into a taxi was one thing, getting Huffman into his cab was another. With his trunk, large enough to sleep in, he finally sank down in the back seat while the driver swore at me as if I was responsible for the weight of that trunk. Huffman's ferret face gazed through the smudged glass at me, and a small deprecating smile crossed his lips.

Back in New Haven. At Yale. My god, the memories. I walked over to Jonathan Edwards, my old stomping ground, went into the Commons Room and sank down in one of those big leather chairs, thinking back to the last time I was in this room. If memory serves, it was the time Ethridge invited me to that seminar with Thornton Wilder as guest of honor. I wanted to ask Wilder about Skin of Our Teeth, which I saw in December of '43, its first week in New York.

I recall it had embarrassed me, sifting in the audience that night, when the big star TalluIah Bankhead, playing the maid in the household, wearing a little black dress with small white apron and carrying a feather duster, whirled around what looked like a realistic set, the kind you'd expect in a Broadway show. Realistic, that is, until the scenery began to float through the air, and miniature dinosaurs came loping out of the fireplace. Then you knew you were in for something special. That came later in the act, but the first thing to baffle me was the moment when Bankhead suddenly dried on stage. She was alone, chatting about this and that, giving us the obligatory exposition, and somebody obviously missed an entrance cue. She said the line a little louder, but still nobody came on. She began to look a little worried. How do you make up lines with yourself, with nobody else on stage? So then she said the cue quite loudly, and we in the audience heard this whisper from the prompter, "Make something up." I was sure somebody had failed to make an entrance. How could this happen in a big Broadway production? Tallulah looked perplexed, but gamely mumbled something, repeated the cue again, this time very loudly. Nothing happened. She stood there for a minute and the whole audience was beginning to feel uneasy, as you'd expect. And then the crazy thing happened. Tallulah suddenly dropped out of her role completely and stepped right down to the foots facing us, with no attempt at all to remain in the scene, to be that maid Sabina. I remember how exasperated she seemed as she glared out at us, and then she launched into her tirade. "I hate this play and every word in it. All about the human race. Now there's a subject for you. Why can't we have plays like we used to? Plays like Smilin' Through and The Bat, plays with a message you can take home with you." Something to that effect. Then of course we all realized it was part of the play, and everybody started giggling and it grew into a big laugh going all the way up to the balcony. The stage manager was now onstage tugging at Tallulah, and that too was part of it. I was hoping to ask Wilder about that scene, and why did he want to destroy the illusion that way, break the convention of the fourth wall? Did they find that in rehearsal? Was that Kazan the director's idea, or what?

There was quite a gathering to hear Thornton Wilder that afternoon in this seminar room, with all these deep lounge chairs. Of course, the room was packed. I had to stand at the back with Ethridge, and I remember my old college roommate Dick Mack was there too. As usual he was wearing those blue-jeans, the realty tight Levi Strauss ones he calls "my Make-Believe-Ballroom-Pants." He slept in those pants.

Mrs. French was hosting, and of course Professor French was there to do the introductions in his role as House Master. He did introduce Wilder, in that grainy subterranean voice of his. It seemed to rumble up from the depths, deep inside his innards, oily and rich, like petroleum sludge, a thick dessert of a voice, which he used to enormous effect in class, particularly when he was reciting the juicier passages from The Canterbury Tales. Wife Margaret, our house mom, had gray hair which looked like an agitated halo framing her buxom face and pendulous cheeks. Professor and Mrs. French were straight out of Dickens.

All the stars of the English Department were there to pay homage. Gordon Height, Beecher Hogan and his wife, and just before they brought Wilder in, Chauncey Brewster Tinker himself appeared in the doorway, very frail, mottled facial skin, a few wisps of hair the color of chalk stranded on his scalp. He was the most extraordinary teacher, not only because he gave me an "A" in his Age of Johnson course. Of course Ethridge idolized him, and tugged at my elbow to whisper "Tink" when I turned to look. As if I didn't know "Tink."

Then a commotion at the door and suddenly Wilder was in the room. A smattering of applause as we pressed close, and now Professor French was telling us, in that subterranean voice of his, that Wilder, "Thornton," as he chummily called him, was just out of service back from Algiers and Caserta. Short, vital, black-rimmed glasses, very dark brows almost threateningly thick, a strong chin and jaw. Not much weakness or sentimentality in that face. Fierce eyes, and a way of talking which absolutely bowled me over. I was going to take notes for my journal, as I always do, but instead found myself just trying to keep up with my ears, let alone my hands. You didn't want to miss a thing. I sat there mouth gaping. It's not fair that a mortal brain should be so brimful. I was trying to jot down phrases from that fire-storm of ideas and impressions, but my scrawl couldn't keep up and grew ever more illegible. The sheer speed was exhausting as ideas and comments and pithy remarks poured out. No, not poured. That's inadequate Gushed out, like a hydrant under extreme pressure, full throttle. And the speed, the sheer speed with which he talked!

It was impossible to recall what he said in any logical sequence. I just remember fleeting bits. Carthage and the Roman amphitheatre there. What did Cleopatra say to Caesar three days before the Ides of March? Then he was off on a spiel about Pip in Great Expectations then back to Suetonius, and did we know about the naughty behavior of the Emperor Tiberius on his cliff side Villa above Capri, where little boys - Wilder called them minnows, as translated from the Latin spintrae - little boys of nine and ten in the pool with the Emperor doing unmentionable things to him while holding their breaths under water. Then more about Pip, and James Joyce, and something about the physio-chemical process involved in a sunset.

On and on he talked while we drank it in, our mouths open, like goldfish in an aquarium gulping a stream of oxygen. I could feel Ethridge next to me, breathing in that stertorous way he has, right in my left ear. His breathing would now and then stop entirely, as if his bodily functions ceased, including breathing, in order not to miss a word. I wouldn't have been surprised if he suddenly toppled over in a dead faint and lay there on the carpet twitching like a fish.

No. Wilder was unbelievable. Talk about a fire storm! This was it. An intellectual inferno of major proportions. What can you possibly say after hearing Thornton Wilder talk for an hour? Was he primed on battery juice? It was electrifying.

Afterward we clustered around, all the English Major toadies - I among them - trying to get a word in. But why on earth would Wilder want to hear any idiotic questions we might pose? Of course by this time the party temperature was gradually cooling off after all of the white heat he generated. We were becoming a bit more normal, our usual selves, despite being in the presence of the most abnormal intellect imaginable.

I tried to wedge myself close enough to ask my question about TalIulah and that first scene of Skin of our Teeth. He actually heard what I said in the crush of noise, and was answering something about hating to write 'realistic' plays. What's realistic about Our Town, where a boy and girl sit on a trestle and imagine they're having a soda at the local drugstore? And in Skin Tallulah deliberately broke the convention of the realistic theatre and upset us all until we realized it was a joke, and began laughing, the laughter of self-congratulation our realization that the writer was putting us on. Then of course we pretended we knew it all along.

What a performance Wilder put on. The crowd babbled excitedly as Mrs. French offered the great man coffee and cake. But Wilder was off, followed by the clatter of English majors and their excited chatter, leaving the room suddenly blank. "Tink" had gone too, and Gordon Height. Had Professor Height noted that I was there? That despite my performance in his class on The Victorian Novel I knew enough to pay my respects to a natural phenomenon like Thornton Wider? That I can recognize the ocean when it's thundering over me?

Ethridge and I went upstairs to his chambers for the obligatory martinis, to talk about what we'd experienced, and to hear his song birds. I am the only person my age in the hemisphere who's ever heard of Povla Frisch. Or Gita Alpar for that matter. I guess some could pin-point Amelita Galli-Curci, and we've all heard of FIagstad. But Povla Frisch? This is opera lore on a stratospheric level.

Ethridge's face was flushed. He had resumed breathing. "Wasn't that simply incredible?" Yes it was, and I wanted to know if Ethridge had kept the strands of Wilder's thoughts separate. He was intrigued with Dickens, of course, but why was Pip bobbing about in that torrent of talk? Why Carthage? Or Cleopatra?

There was one totally unexpected detour which did stay in my mind. Wilder was on some tangent about somebody, André Gide, I think. And suddenly I heard, or thought I heard, or maybe misheard, or didn't really understand, something he said about artists. I suppose he was talking about himself, but it was highly ambiguous. Artists show a predisposition to neurosis in infancy, he said. As years pass and the infant grows older, becomes adolescent, the neurosis becomes conscious of itself. Then what happens? The subject, the neurotic infant, now an adolescent, begins to feel that he's an exception. Not really part of society. Outside. Unique. Did he actually say that? Or merely infer it? You have a neurotic child, and that child begins to feel he's an exception in society, and as an exception he wants to tell all about his neurosis to everybody who'll listen, while at the same time he's desperate to conceal his neurosis. Does that make sense?

By now I was downing Ethridge's martinis along with thin wafers, slivers of cheese perched on them, tiny slivers, all but invisible so the supply would last. Ethridge was always on what he called a budget. Others might have another word for it.

As the liquor loosened us and we were talking about Wilder, I mentioned this business of the neurotic infant growing up to become a neurotic adolescent who begins to think of himself as being 'different,' the exception in society; and now in danger of being split down the middle by two conflicting desires: the desire to tell everyone just how unique, artistic, crazy he is, and the desire to keep his craziness a total mystery. Or at least a secret.

Much of what was swirling in my mind I felt uncomfortable expressing to Ethridge. Anyhow, by that time he was forcing me to guess which of his canaries we were hearing on his gramophone. Some of those voices could only be heard after he delicately sharpened the thong needle by means of which the sound reached our ears. Those singers were truly from the golden vocal past. We didn't have Jenny Lind, but Sembrich was there, and of course Adalina Patti, and Lilli Lehmann, who actually knew Richard Wagner, and even des Reszke Brothers, and Pol Plançon. A cornucopia of the great voices from long ago.

Ethridge would put on a record and turn to me with his bony face, cheeks flushed with gin, his watery blue eyes now damp with pleasure. Soon there were tears. Not of despair, or pain, but of pure joy. And Thornton Wider and the whole experience had melted into the background while we heard the limpid tones of Galli-Curci singing "Home Sweet Home", and Ethridge's mouth curled in a smile. He was experiencing something deliciously satisfying. "One of the truly great," he would tell me. "Just hear that glorious rubato."

That was memorable, that afternoon with Thornton Wilder. But I drank too many martinis. After the fifth I stumbled down to my own room where Dick Mack was lying on his bed, still wearing those tight jeans, staring at the ceiling.

This is an excerpt from the journals of Charles Nolte, which are archived in the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies at the University of Minnesota. For more information about Charles Nolte and the collection, please visit the Nolte Collection website. © 2010, University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.

Michael Shannon photo by Carol Rosegg

The Off-Broadway production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town began performances on Feb. 17, 2009, with an official opening night on Feb. 26, 2009, when it received rave reviews at the downtown venue (whose space has been completely redesigned for this staging).

Our Town went on to win the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Production and Outstanding Direction and Obie Award for Outstanding Director. It became the longest-running production of the play in its 72-year history with its record-breaking 337th performance on Dec. 16, 2009.

Academy Award nominee Michael Shannon, of "Revolutionary Road," took over the role of the Stage Manager on Feb. 23.

Cromer and his producers gutted the venue and put the audience in a three-quarter configuration, with rows of theatregoers also added in the middle of the playing area.

The ticket booking period has now been extended to June 27.

Shannon was acclaimed for his work in the incendiary Off-Broadway production of Tracy Letts' Bug (at the Barrow Street). He grew up in Lexington, KY, and began his professional stage career in Chicago. His first acting role was in Winterset at the Illinois Theatre Center. He continued working on the stage with Steppenwolf, The Next Lab and A Red Orchid Theatre. He originated the role of Harry Brown in Letts' Man From Nebraska at Steppenwolf. He was Oscar-nominated as Best Supporting Actor for playing a mentally unstable character in "Revolutionary Road."

The cast of Our Town. Photo by Carol Rosegg

Our Town won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1938 and is one of the best-known American plays of the 20th century. It charts the range of human experience in a tale of two families in small-town Grover's Corners, NH, "just across the Massachusetts line," between 1901-13.

The businesslike Stage Manager character introduces and guides us through the meta-theatrical three-act tale, spanning 13 years of town history. Daily life, love and marriage, and death are its three rueful chapters.

The physical production, as indicated in the script by Wilder, has always been bare-bones and highly presentational. Cromer takes that to another level: performers wear (mostly) street clothes and the house lights are on for most of the show.

*

Our Town is produced by Scott Morfee, Jean Doumanian, Tom Wirtshafter, Ted Snowdon, Eagle Productions, Dena Hammerstein/Pam Pariseau, The Weinstein Company, and Burnt Umber Productions.

The performance schedule is Tuesday-Friday at 7:30 PM, Saturday at 2:30 PM & 7:30 PM, Sunday at 2:30 PM & 7:30 PM. Tickets are priced at $69 & $49.50 and are available through SmartTix (212) 868-4444, www.smarttix.com, or at the Barrow Street Theatre box office (open at 1 PM daily) at 27 Barrow Street at Seventh Avenue South.

Student tickets at $20 are available on the day of performance only at the box office.

Something Wilder
By Jeremy McCarter | NEWSWEEK
Published Sep 17, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Sep 28, 2009

Wilder photographed in 1935 on the deck of the S.S. Britannic, returning to the United States.

There, in brief, is the Wilder conundrum. When he is remembered today, it is almost always in his owl persona, as the folksy author of a folksy play, Our Town. But this gets both play and author almost completely backward. Done right, Our Town isn't a nostalgic wallow in small-town life, it's a harrowing story about human limitation--all the beauty and value we fail to recognize in our day-to-day lives. Far from being a homespun yarn-spinner, Wilder is one of the most sophisticated and penetrating writers the country has produced.

He's also, in his quiet way, one of the weirdest. A Wilder boomlet of recent years--a new collection of his plays, a new anthology of his letters to fellow cosmopolitans like Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, a sterling revival of Our Town currently running off-Broadway--has just entered an especially captivating phase. This month the Library of America republished his first five novels. In style, setting, and subject, they dance around from ancient Rome to 18th-century Peru to the 1930s Midwest. They are also, for the most part, excellent--as compelling and puzzling today as when they first appeared between 1925 and 1948. Nobody who reads them could ever again mistake their author for a man right out of Pepperidge Farm.

For people who know Wilder only via Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, the mere existence of these books may come as a surprise. In fact, his fiction came before his drama. Though he won a Pulitzer for each of those plays, he'd already collected one in 1928 for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Even now, he remains the only writer to be so recognized in both art forms.

Wilder achieved all of this thanks first to those uncanny eyes. He perceived with equal acuity the tiny details of daily life and the grand sweep of space and time. After graduating from Yale in 1921, he spent a year doing archeology in Rome, an experience that changed his outlook forever. Once you've dug up a 4,000-year-old highway, he said, "you look at Times Square as a place about which you imagine some day scholars saying, 'There appears to have been some kind of public center here.' "

That Roman year also gave him material for his first novel, The Cabala, in which the fruits of his distinctive vision become clear. Though Wilder resorts to a couple of iffy supernatural flourishes, his story about a young American getting tangled up in the lives of Roman gentry has an insinuating style. The accounts of the characters' romances and family histories are like being treated to gossip in high WASP style. (Though he was born in Wisconsin and spent his early years in China and California--prefiguring a life spent zipping around the globe--Wilder came from New England Protestant stock, and not the late arrivals, either.)

To say that Wilder was all-seeing doesn't mean that he sat in cruel judgment. Unlike Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, whose picture peered out of a billboard in The Great Gatsby, he didn't look down on a malign and dirty world. All of Wilder's books depict a world shimmering with mysteries. He's one of literature's most earnest explorers of faith and love. The heroes of four of these novels and an important character in the fifth all wonder explicitly if there's a God and try to puzzle out his intentions.

This question looms particularly large in Heaven's My Destination. Wilder used knowledge he'd gained on his lecture tours--"I know America down to every absurd Keep Smiling Club, every gas station, every hot-dog stand," he wrote in 1931--to depict the travels of George M. Brush through the Depression-era heartland. All he wants is to find his girl, sell his textbooks, and discover why God lets bad things happen to good people, himself included. Wilder showed an easy comic touch here, giving the Gandhi-worshiping George a trial scene worthy of Joseph Heller.
Despite this early success, Wilder grew dissatisfied with the novel form. His vast reading (in at least four languages) told him that the omniscient narrator didn't suit the chaos of 20th-century life. So after three years' wartime service in Army intelligence (from which he returned, characteristically successful, as a lieutenant colonel with a Bronze Star), he took a new approach to fiction. The Ides of Marchis a novel about Caesar's last months told entirely through letters among the dictator, his confidants, and his enemies. It's a kind of highbrow puzzle that befits a writer who, in his spare time, became one of the world's authorities on Finnegans Wake. By book's end, Wilder's ingenious structure, which traverses the same events from different angles, makes Caesar's questions about religion and politics seem to hang in the air, to outlive him. How many novels are intellectually haunting?

Wilder wrote more books after Ides--they'll be included in a forthcoming second volume, also edited by J. D. McClatchy--but he never improved on one reprinted here. The Bridge of San Luis Rey is his delicate, devastating masterpiece. When a Peruvian bridge collapses and sends five people to their deaths, a well-meaning monk sets out to learn all he can about the deceased, thus to reveal whether we live by plan or by chance. Nowhere did Wilder write more vivid characters or more deeply felt (and sometimes brutally heartbreaking) stories, or put to better use a literary touch that's as light as a spider's. In a speech after the 9/11 attacks, Tony Blair made an inspired citation of the book's closing peroration on love, and how it endures through cruelty and death. "There is a land of the living and a land of the dead," it concludes, "and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

Wilder's fiction endures not just because his spooky eyes let him see so much, but because he was too honest to depict any more than that. By refusing to give easy answers to the hard questions he pondered, he makes us a little more attuned to them ourselves. After you read these books, people seem a little more mysterious, more infused with some ineffable spirit beyond flesh and blood. In their modest way, Wilder's novels do what he believed Shakespeare had done when he created his great heroines: to alter "the spiritual weather of the world."

Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/215555
© 2009

"...Or wait til I'm dead: they say it's really possible to find a unified theme in an author when he's stopped writing (dead or senile)."

--Thornton Wilder to George F. Edmonds, April 14, 1972

Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) received three Pulitzer Prizes - for The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. His plays today are collectively produced at least twice every day of the year; but his novels, although all in print, have attracted far less attention. On the occasion of the landmark publication by the Library of America of Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Other Novels 1926-1948, scholars in classics and American literature, journalists, biographers, and family members participate in a one-day program of lectures, panels, interviews, and readings that will try to place Wilder's fiction in American literary history and culture.

Participating in the Wilder Colloquium will be:

Jackson R. Bryer - Co-editor of The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder
Michael Dirda - Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post book critic
Judith P. Hallett - Professor of Classics, University of Maryland
Jeremy McCarter - Senior Writer for Arts, Culture and Entertainment, Newsweek
J. D. McClatchy - Editor of the Library of America volume
Penelope Niven - Author of a forthcoming biography of Wilder
Kurt Raaflaub - Professor Emeritus of Classics, Brown University
Martha Nell Smith - Professor of English, University of Maryland
Cecelia Tichi - William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English, Vanderbilt University
Christopher Wheatley - Professor of English, Catholic University of America
Tappan Wilder -Thornton Wilder's nephew and Literary Executor

Sponsored by the Departments of English and Classics and the Center for
Literary and Comparative Studies of the University of Maryland, College Park;
the Classical Association of the Atlantic States; and the Thornton Wilder Society

For more information, contact, Judith P. Hallett at jeph@umd.edu .

Directed by Jeff Christian

"That's all we do--always beginning again! Over and over again. Always beginning again."

"Don't forget that a few years ago we came through the depression by the skin of our teeth! One more tight squeeze like that and where will we be?" -Sabrina

The Artistic Home, under Jeff Christian's smart staging, has another ambitious American classic well in hand. The Skin of Our Teeth is a tough play to mount as it is complex and a tad unyielding. Innovative staging, a quick pace as well as strong actors equally at ease with comedy as well as drama are required to have a chance to do Wilder's biting satire justice. I'm happy to report that Christian and the cast at The Artistic Home have mounted a most spirited and worthy production.

Wilder's 1942 Pulitzer Prize winner is an ageless and amazingly inventive portrayal of the human condition. It is a cautionary tale that stylistically and theatrically presents a capsule look at the history of man from the ice age through the Jazz age of the 1920's to the culmination of a sever year war.

With an ode to Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, Thornton Wilder breaks with many theatrical conventions including having the stage manager stop the play to make announcements to Sabrina (Maria Stephens) going off script to directly address the audience. Wilder names his family the 'Antrobus' meaning human or person in Greek. The son, Henry (Nick Horast) changed his name from Cain after murdering his brother Able. Biblical references and archetypes populate Wilder's drama. Smart use of video 'news clips' enhances the work.

Satirical humor, a woolly mammoth and a dinosaur are present as Act One (of three acts spread over 2 hours, 40 minutes) as the maid, Sabina narrates and sets-up the inventive story concerning the Antrobus family. George Antrobus (John Mossman) is the learned Adam figure while Maggie Antrobus (Kathy Scambiatterra) is the Eve persona. They are on the brink of the ice age followed by the great flood and ending just after a seven year war.

The satire reeks much humor as the manic pace keeps the work fresh. Through the Antrobus family and their maid (terrific work from Maria Stephens), Wilder depicts the progression of humanity as it teeters on the brink of disaster. These is high emotion, wild comedy filled with hopefulness as it swings from the life cycle of basic existence to survival and triumph as humans prove their resilience and will to survive.

The ensemble work here is first-class and the real life husband and wife team of John Mossman and Kathy Scambiatterra anchor the work with their steadfast and truthful performances as the Antrobus parents. See this show and appreciate both Thornton Wilder's provocative work and the Artistic Home's high production values.

Highly Recommended

Tom Williams

Talk Theatre in Chicago podcast

Date Reviewed: February 9, 2010

This review also posted on www.mytheatreclub.com/articles.php

At The Artistic Home, 3914 N. Clark, Chicago, IL, call 866-811-4111, www.theartistichome.org, Thursdays at 7:30pm, Fridays & Saturdays at 8 pm, Sundays at 3 pm, running time is 2 hours, 40 minutes with 2 intermissions, through March 21, 2010

For the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, Douglas, Arizona was a place to "refresh the wells" and drive into the sunset.
By Tom Miller
Smithsonian Magazine, July 2009

The playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder won three Pulitzer Prizes, the admiration of his peers and success at the box office and bookstore. Ever accessible, he gave lectures, responded to queries about his plays and even acted in them. But eventually he tired of strangers asking him what the ladders in Our Town symbolized or what metaphor readers should take from The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Wilder had been so famous for so long that, nearing 65, he felt worn down. He wanted a break, he told the Associated Press in March 1962, so that he could "refresh the wells by getting away from it all in some quiet place."

Wilder's travels over the years had taken him to spas, aboard cruise liners and to world capitals, where he mingled with the intelligentsia. This time, though, he sought an unpretentious town in which to settle for a while, envisioning, he told the AP, "a little white frame house with a rickety front porch where I can laze away in the shade in a straight-backed wooden rocking chair." It would be a place where he could belly up to a local bar and hear real people talk about day-to-day trivialities. Most of all, he wanted a place where he could read and write at his own pace. He hoped, his nephew Tappan Wilder says, for "solitude without loneliness."

Shortly after noon on May 20, 1962, Wilder backed his five-year-old blue Thunderbird convertible out of the driveway of his Connecticut home and lighted out for the Great Southwest. After ten days on the road and almost 2,500 miles, the Thunderbird broke down on U.S. Highway 80, just east of Douglas, Arizona, a town of some 12,000 on the Mexican border about 120 miles southeast of Tucson. Douglas lay on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, and summer temperatures there routinely exceeded 100 degrees, broken only by occasional thunderstorms.

Wilder checked into the Hotel Gadsden, where rooms cost from $5 to $12 a night. Named for the United States diplomat who, in 1853, negotiated with Mexico for the land Douglas sits on, the Gadsden has an ornate, high ceiling with a stained-glass skylight. Its staircase is of Italian marble. Its restaurant offered a fried cornmeal breakfast with butter and syrup for 55 cents and a lunch of calves' brains, green chili and scrambled eggs with mashed potatoes for $1.25.

The Phelps Dodge copper smelter just west of town dominated the landscape--and the local economy. Established at the beginning of the 20th century by mining executive James Douglas, the town was laid out in a grid with streets wide enough for a 20-mule team to make a U-turn. It mixed an Anglo upper and merchant class with a strong, union-oriented Mexican-American working class; schools were loosely segregated.

Wilder informed his sister Isabel, who was handling his business affairs back East, that he found his fellow Gadsden bar patrons that first night an amiable lot. No one asked him about ambiguity in the poems of T. S. Eliot or nonlinearity in the fiction of John Dos Passos. He extended his stay for another day, then a week, followed by a month, finally staying more than two months at the Gadsden.

"Arizona is beautiful," he wrote to his friends writer-director Garson Kanin and his wife, actress Ruth Gordon, "oh, overwhelmingly beautiful." Wilder wrote frequently to friends and family, ruminating on literature, theater and his solitary life. He started a ritual of sunset drives into the nearby Sonoran Desert, and when he drove farther in search of good food--to Bisbee, Tombstone or Sierra Vista--he marveled at the "grandeur of the ride, an hour into the Book of Genesis." He introduced himself by his middle name, Niven, and people called him "Doc" or "Professor," perhaps because of the many questions he asked.

In early August, Wilder rented a small three-room furnished flat on the top floor of a two-story apartment house at the southwest corner of 12th Street and D Avenue. It had everything he needed: two single beds--one for himself, the other for his papers--a divan, an overstuffed chair, four gas burners atop a stove he was afraid to ignite, an unsteady card table on which to work and Art Nouveau lamps.

It was here that he established a routine of reading and writing. His agenda included Lope de Vega, Finnegans Wake and refreshing his Greek. He'd set his work aside around noon and stroll to the post office for his mail. Lunch was usually a sandwich of his own making, followed by more work. He'd take an occasional jaunt into Agua Prieta, the Mexican city adjoining Douglas, or explore other nearby towns. Dinner would usually find him at the Gadsden, the Palm Grove or the Pioneer Café. He'd end most evenings chatting in a bar. "My plan is working splendidly," he wrote to Isabel. Back in Connecticut, his sister told callers he was somewhere in the Southwest recovering from exhaustion.

A typical Wilder report: "Midnight: Went up to Top Hat to close the bar...new bowling alley restaurant and bar has stolen business from all over town." At the end of one letter, he wrote, "Now I must get this to the P.O and then go to the Gadsden Bar and get a hair of the dog that bit me last night." Sometimes, when Douglas bartenders announced last call, Wilder and his drinking buddies would cross the border a mile to the south to continue their drinking in Mexico.

Wilder came to douglas with no grand work in mind, theatrical or literary. Yet slowly, an idea began taking shape, one more suited for the page than the stage--a murder mystery, one that began in a mining town and, like its author, traveled far and wide.

In the winter of 1963 he felt confident enough to divulge his book's beginnings to intimates back East. He described his manuscript, eventually titled The Eighth Day, "as though Little Women was being mulled over by Dostoyevsky." Soon he hit his stride: "Every new day is so exciting because I have no idea beforehand what will come out of the fountain-pen," he wrote (and underlined) to his sister. It opens in early 20th-century "Coaltown," Illinois, and spans continents, generations and philosophies. A convicted murderer escapes from custody and, as a fugitive, develops a new personality. After 15 years writing exclusively for the stage, Thornton Wilder was once again writing a novel.

At least once a month he would drive to Tucson, where, as "T. Niven Wilder," he used the University of Arizona library, bought the New Yorker ("It continues its decline," he wrote home) and visited Ash Alley 241, a folk music club. He enjoyed the long drives not merely for the change of pace, but also because, lacking a radio in his apartment, he could listen to the news as he drove. During the Cuban missile crisis that October, he drove 50 miles to dine at the Wagon Wheel in Tombstone in part, he acknowledged to a friend, because "I wanted to hear what the air could tell me of Cuba and the United Nations." For Christmas he gave himself a record player from Sears and bought recordings of Mozart string quartets.

The citizens of Douglas thought Wilder a most amiable odd duck, recalls Nan Ames, whose husband owned the Round-Up, a bar the writer visited regularly. People nodded to him on the street, and he nodded back. On occasion he'd drop by the telephone company to make a long-distance call--he had no phone at his apartment--and provoked some suspicion on the part of the local operator, who detected an odd accent in the voice of this man who invariably and unaccountably wore a coat and tie.

Wilder would have an occasional drink with Louie, the town engineer, Pete from the Highway Patrol or Eddie, the Federal Aviation Administration man at the local airport. Among his acquaintances he counted Rosie, the Gadsden elevator operator, and Gladys, the cook at the Palm Grove. He wrote home that Thelma's daughter Peggy, who had gotten fired from a bar, married a fellow named Jerry. He learned that Smitty, a bartender at the Gadsden, was hospitalized with stomach ulcers and that Smitty's wife spent "a good deal of time on a high stool at Dawson's." He referred to his nighttime coterie as "the Little Group of Serious Drinkers."

He was more observant than judgmental. "Peggy was fired, I guess," he wrote of the merry-go-round among tavern employees. "And is replaced by Haydee--there's this floating population of waitresses--bar attendants-- each several times divorced; each with several children...our geishas." The bar crowd's intrigues sufficed. "I've met no 'cultivated' folk," he wrote a friend a year after moving to Douglas, "and I have not missed them."

Wilder accepted an invitation to dinner at the home of Jim Keegan, the town's surgeon, and his wife, Gwen. While she prepared spaghetti in the kitchen, Wilder peppered the doctor about his profession. "He brought a bottle of wine," Gwen recalled recently. "I loved his laugh. He was a very curious guy--easy to talk to, full of knowledge and life. He was very vibrant."

The relentlessly curious Wilder listened to his Douglas acquaintances talk about how to make soap and which drinks go with kippered herring. He asked a lot of questions, and many of the answers found their way into The Eighth Day. "He wanted to know how one would set up a boardinghouse," Nan Ames recalls. "He was not as down-to-earth as most people in the world. He was learning to be casual. Ask questions--that's what he did best."

For all the goodwill and friendly respect Douglas offered, Wilder began to detect an undercurrent "bubbling with hatred." At a bar one night, a rancher pounded the table with his fist and declared: "Mrs. Roosevelt did more harm to the world than ten Hitlers." A woman who worked at the telephone office asked another townsperson, "Who is that Mr. Wilder, is he a Communist?" Just after the assassination of President Kennedy, a fellow at the Gadsden bar said, "Well, he had it coming to him, didn't he?"

After a year and a half, Wilder left Douglas, Arizona, on November 27, 1963, never to return. He traveled to Washington, D.C. to receive the Medal of Freedom from President Lyndon Johnson, then to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for his brother Amos' retirement from the Harvard Divinity School faculty. The Eighth Day, after considerable expansion and revision, was published in 1967. By far Wilder's longest and most ambitious book, it became a best seller and won the National Book Award. Tappan Wilder, the author's nephew and literary executor, says "he went to Douglas, Arizona, as a playwright and came home a novelist."

Who among us doesn't seek a hideaway, a place without distractions, a neutral space in which to do whatever it is that nurtures us--solitude without loneliness? Thornton Wilder regained his literary voice in remote Arizona, and for him his temporary hometown's name became synonymous with rejuvenation. More than five years after departing the Arizona desert he wrote a friend: "Ever since I keep hunting for another 'Douglas.' "

Tom Miller has written ten books about the American Southwest and Latin America, including The Panama Hat Trail.