Thornton Wilder

Stratford Shakespeare Festival's Production of The Matchmaker: Video Interview with Des McAnuff

2012-04-20T14:50:29Z

"There's nothing that makes an audience feel better than The Matchmaker."
-Stratford Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director, Des McAnuff

General Director Antoni Cimolino, Artistic Director Des McAnuff and Director of Communications David Prosser discuss the Stratford Shakespeare Festival's 2012 production of The Matchmaker. Find out how this fun-filled comedy is connected to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

Mor info at http://www.stratfordshakespearefestival.com
1.800.567.1600
_____________________________
FESTIVAL THEATRE
May 12 to October 27; Opens June 2

THE MATCHMAKER
By Thornton Wilder
Directed by Chris Abraham

CAST
Horace Vandergelder: Tom McCamus
Dolly Levi: Seana McKenna
Irene Molloy: Laura Condlln
Cornelius Hackl: Mike Shara
Malachi Stack: Geraint Wyn Davies
Ambrose Kemper: Skye Brandon
Ermengarde: Cara Ricketts
Minnie Fay: Andrea Runge

Designer: Santo Loquasto
Lighting Designer: Michael Walton
Sound Designer: Thomas Ryder Payne

Garrison Keillor's Tribute to Thornton Wilder on the 115th Anniversary of his Birth

2012-04-17T15:09:52Z

It's the birthday of the writer who said, "My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate." Thornton Wilder (books by this author), born in Madison, Wisconsin (1897). His father was a diplomat, so Wilder and his four brothers and sisters moved back and forth between Asia and the United States. His parents were supportive, but sometimes overbearing. They dictated what Wilder did with his time, and made him work on farms in the summer so that he would be more well-rounded. They decided where he would go to college: to Oberlin, in Ohio, and then to Yale.

After some time in Rome, Wilder got a job teaching French at a boys' boarding school. In 1926, Wilder spent the summer at MacDowell Colony, a writers' retreat in New Hampshire, and he started work on his second novel. It was set in the Spanish colonial era of the 18th century -- the story of a bridge that collapses in Lima, Peru, while five people are crossing it. The collapse is witnessed by a Franciscan monk, who becomes obsessed by the tragedy and tries to figure out why those five people had to die. Wilder finished it less than a year later and sent it off to his publisher, who almost turned it down, complaining that it was written "for a small over-cultivated circle of readers." But when The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) was published, it was an immediate success. It won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize, and by that time, it had sold nearly 300,000 copies and been through 17 printings.

Wilder earned enough from The Bridge of San Luis Rey to quit his job and build a house for himself, his parents, and his sisters in Hamden, Connecticut. He called it "the house the bridge built." That house was his official residence for the rest of his life.
In 1962, Wilder was 65 years old, a famous writer. He was best known for his plays, like his Pulitzer-winning Our Town (1938) and The Matchmaker (1955), which was adapted into the musical Hello, Dolly!. He had not written a novel for almost 20 years. He was tired of being in the limelight, and he wanted to escape his comfortable life in Connecticut, so Wilder got in his Thunderbird convertible and headed southwest. The car broke down just outside of Douglas, Arizona, a town on the Mexican border, and that's where Wilder stayed for a year and a half. He was happy to be somewhere where nobody knew much about him or his writing. He rented an apartment with one bed for himself and one for all his papers. During the days he wrote, read, and took walks, and in the evenings he hung around the bar asking questions -- so many questions that everyone called him "Doc" or "Professor." When he left Douglas at the end of 1963, he had a good start on a novel. In 1967 he published it as The Eighth Day, and it won a National Book Award.

He said, "There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head."

And: "The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself, 'Oh, now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home.' And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure."

David Cromer to Direct and Appear in Our Town for Huntington's 2012-13 Season

2012-04-13T17:53:40Z

Obie Award-winning director David Cromer will helm and appear in his acclaimed production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town as part of the Huntington Theatre Company's 2012-13 season.

Cromer (Tribes, Brighton Beach Memoirs), who directed and appeared as the Stage Manager in the long-running Off-Broadway revival of Our Town, will again perform double-duty for the Huntington. Cromer's staging of Wilder's classic will be the first Huntington production in the Roberts Studio Theatre.

More information on the Huntington Theatre's 2012-2013 Season is available on their website.

J. D. McClatchy on Thornton Wilder's "mesmerizing revisionist method of story-telling"

2012-03-29T16:23:02Z

Written for The Library of America Blog
Wednesday, December 15

J. D. McClatchy, poet and critic, recently spoke with us about Thornton Wilder: The Eighth Day, Theophilus North, Autobiographical Writings, which he edited for The Library of America.

Except for Our Town and maybe The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder's work is not well known today. Why should readers care about his work? Why the Library of America edition, and why now?

Wilder has too often been thought of as less a serious writer than a popular one. Our Town and The Bridge were instantly successful, and remain widely read--two faults held against them by the professoriate, who have all along condescended to Wilder as a sentimental, old-fashioned back number. (They should check with Edward Albee, for example, who considers Our Town not only the greatest American play but also the darkest and eeriest.) It may be that in the Modernist triumph, Wilder was not thought of as a radical experimentalist--a crucial label for critical darlings like Joyce and Eliot. (Hemingway and Fitzgerald could hardly be considered experimental either, but they exuded a certain glamour that the more philosophically inclined Wilder never depended on.) Neither the Modernist canon nor most college syllabi include Wilder, and his reputation--despite the acclaim in his lifetime--moves now under the radar. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that, all along, he has been hiding in plain sight. It's my hope that these comprehensive Library of America editions will help to reveal a writer whose narrative skill and layered perspectives are both challenging and enthralling. He was such a lively stylist--in a novel like The Ides of March, say--that earlier readers may have overlooked his mesmerizing revisionist method of story-telling, constantly upending our sense of the motives and emotions of characters.

Wilder remains a writer whom readers approach, I think, on their own. He is discovered more than he is taught. In that he resembles the great experiences of life--sex and love and ambition and heartbreak. Readers encounter the novels of Wilder more often by chance than by assignment, and the result is a more private, personal experience, as if they alone understand. We don't experience Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Faulkner like that, since we encounter their work publicly, in class. They're the ABCs of American fiction. When you discover Wilder it's as if you've found a new letter. I wouldn't put Wilder ahead of those others, but he's part of the alphabet.

The Eighth Day is a particular favorite of yours. Why?

I suspect it was also Wilder's favorite. He had been working with mixed success on two series of one-act plays, and seemed to have reached an impasse in his career. So he stopped, drove to the desert, and started to re-make himself as a writer. He wanted to return to the novel, and he was after something big, something as grand and expansive as one of the classic nineteenth-century novels he loved. (Even his descriptions of it as a work-in-progress hinted at his ambition. While writing the early chapters about the Ashley family boarding house, he joked to a friend that he was aiming for a cross between Louisa May Alcott and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.) He took his time writing it (it appeared a month before he turned seventy), realizing it would be unlike anything he had attempted before. He took the slimmest thread--a murder mystery--and wove it into a tapestry that spans continents and generations. It is his epic, a summing up of himself, his family, our national experience (as he saw it--a humane version of American exceptionalism), all of it posed in large and often global terms, suggested in part by the then novel ideas of Teilhard de Chardin. Coaltown is another Our Town, nowhere and everywhere.

By the way, The Eighth Day was also a favorite of John Updike's. He once wrote of it: "Untidily, self-delightingly, it brims with wonder and wisdom, and aspires to prophecy. We marvel at a novel of such spiritual ambition and benign flamboyance."

Wilder's work seems so various. Are there connections between the subjects and themes and literary approaches of these later books and earlier works like Bridge of San Luis Rey and Heaven's My Destination? With the plays?

I think there are two strong impulses that animate Wilder's work. In a 1930 letter to a friend who asked about his first three novels, Wilder wrote: "It seems to me that my books are about: What is the worst thing that the world can do to you, and what are the last resources one has to oppose to it?" So, the isolated human in extremis. And there is a contrary impulse as well: the picaresque. From Heaven's My Destination to Theophilus North, Wilder loved an adventuring hero--let's call him a minor American version of Don Quixote. To a Freudian, both these impulses might be rooted in Wilder's difficult childhood, spent constantly on the move and often apart from his family. What both themes have in common is something they share with the author: a profound sense of loneliness.

There are other recurring motifs. Strong female characters, for one, from Madre Maria del Pilar in The Bridge to Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker to Eustacia Sims in The Eighth Day.

This third volume presents for the first time a number of previously unpublished autobiographical writings from late in Wilder's career.

Yes, he had trouble writing directly about himself, and late in life discovered that he could take incidents and occasions from his past and "fictionalize" them. The fact that he was a twin whose brother died at birth was the most riveting of these occasions and led him to write Theophilus North, which he published at age seventy-six. But he kept on writing up other facts of his life, using the basics while changing the specifics. Three of these later pieces are included in this new volume. China, Yale, and Salzburg--it's a marvelous miscellany that nods to an exciting life and to the writer's ability to transform it.

From mid-career onward, Wilder was something of a nomad, traveling to far-flung places in order to write: he stopped in the desert town of Douglas, Arizona, where he knew no one, and spent more than a year there working on The Eighth Day. Why was he so peripatetic?

Wilder needed stimulants. Some writers don't. Flaubert, say, or Henry James seemed deliberately to avoid them. But other writers--Hemingway is an obvious if overblown instance--crave them and depend on them. They seek out new experience in order to transform and shape it into material. They put themselves in the way of things, the better to watch and overhear, to "finger the goods," as it were. This partially accounts for Wilder's restlessness, his large acquaintanceship. Conversation and alcohol, I suppose, in quantities that tended to exhaust those around him, you could count too as necessary stimulants. Then again, there is no writer who does not need to withdraw. Emily Dickinson had her bedroom, Wilder had his stateroom. He most loved to write on ocean crossings. There was the kind of freedom he preferred: an absolutely limited freedom: the freedom to roam at will while confined to the middle of nowhere; the freedom to keep a thin wall between his work and the idle, partying crowd that be both craved and avoided. But let me add a word about your use of "peripatetic." As a young child he shuttled--Wisconsin, China, California. It must have come to seem normal.

Our Congratulations to Drew Davis, winner of the 2011 Thornton Wilder Playwriting Contest

2012-03-23T21:01:42Z

Drew's play The Message, adapted from Wilder's playlet The Message and Jehanne reveals the motive behind the mix-up that yields such dramatic results in Wilder's story.

More to follow on the play's upcoming publication and world premiere.

Drew Davis is a freelance writer in the Augusta, Georgia area and a member of the Dramatists Guild of America and the American Association of Community Theatre. His plays have been produced in San Diego, Chicago, and the southeast including Atlanta, as well as Cheshire, England. Two of his short stories were published in the western anthology Award Winning Tales. His one-act The Message is the 2011 Thornton Wilder Playwriting Contest winner.

Thornton Wilder: A Life, by Penelope Niven

2012-03-20T18:20:18Z

On Sale October 30, 2012
Thornton Wilder: A Life is the first biography of this pivotal, pioneering American playwright and novelist to be based on thousands of pages of letters, public and private journals, manuscripts and other documentary evidence of Wilder's life, work and times. Biographer Penelope Niven (Carl Sandburg: A Biography; Steichen: A Biography; Voices and Silences, co-authored with James Earl Jones) has worked for more than a decade with unprecedented access to the Wilder papers in her exploration of his public life and work and much of what he called the drama of his inner life.

This biography presents a three-dimensional Wilder as never seen before. A multifaceted man--son, brother, student, soldier, teacher, novelist, playwright, lecturer, actor, musician, man of letters, international public figure-he was also enigmatic and intensely private. Because he was a member of a close-knit, complicated family, this is a family saga, starring Thornton Wilder, with strong supporting roles played by his father, mother, and siblings: two brilliant parents, five gifted children, and, for Thornton, the specter of his twin brother lost at birth. This very private man possessed a remarkable gift for friendship, and the biography offers portraits of friends he made as he traveled the globe, including countless private people of all ages and stations in life, and such public figures as Gene Tunney, Laurence Olivier, Alexander Woollcott, Hadley Hemingway, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Gertrude Stein, Montgomery Clift, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin.

Equally at home in the realms of fiction and drama, Wilder was honored in his own country and around the world, and his novels and plays still speak to a global audience. Yet despite the international fame and visibility of the writer, far too little has been known or understood about the man. Within the body of Wilder's published and unpublished work, there stands the person, his private, inward self sometimes hidden and sometimes revealed in his art and in his papers. Thornton Wilder: A Life brings the private man center stage, and in the process, sheds new light on his work.

www.penelopeniven.com

To schedule an interview or an appearance with PENELOPE NIVEN, contact:
Kate Blum
Kate.Blum@harpercollins.com
212/207-7362

Spring Fashion: Wilder Hits the Catalogs!

2012-03-07T13:05:21Z

"There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head."

Thornton Wilder in Douglas, AZ--Upcoming Lectures by Tom Miller

2012-02-20T21:48:55Z

Wilder, in 1962, weary of being a public intellectual, settled in Douglas where he read voluminously, wrote incessantly, and hit the bars nocturnally. Eighteen months later, rejuvenated by his relative anonymity, he returned east, his literary skills re-energized. In two forthcoming lectures, author Tom Miller explores Wilder's Arizona sojourn, showing its importance in his literary life and America's literature. This unknown slice of Arizona's recent past reveals the crossroads of a small border town with the American literary establishment.

Event Information:

Tuesday, Feb. 28 in Bisbee, Arizona:
5:30 pm, Copper Queen Library

Thursday, March 8 in Willcox Arizona:
12 noon, Hogan Community Library

Both events underwritten by the Arizona Humanities Council

About Tom Miller:

Tom Miller has been writing about Latin America and the American Southwest for more than thirty years, bringing us extraordinary stories of ordinary people. Miller's highly acclaimed adventure books include The Panama Hat Trail about South America, On the Border, an account of his travels along the U.S.-Mexico frontier, Trading With the Enemy, which takes readers on his journeys through Cuba, and, about the American Southwest, Revenge of the Saguaro. Additionally, he has edited three compilations, How I Learned English, Travelers' Tales Cuba, and Writing on the Edge: A Borderlands Reader.

Miller, a veteran of the underground press of the 1960s, has appeared in Smithsonian, The New Yorker, LIFE, The New York Times, Natural History, and many other publications. He wrote the introduction to Best Travel Writing - 2005, and has led educational tours through Cuba for the National Geographic Society and other organizations. His collection of some eighty versions of "La Bamba" led to his Rhino Records release, "The Best of La Bamba." His book On the Border has been optioned by Productvision for a theatrical film.

Miller was born and raised in Washington, D.C., attended college in Ohio, and since 1969 has lived in Arizona 65 miles north of the Mexican border. He is a past fellow of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and holds membership in the Thornton Wilder Society and the Cervantes Society of America. He was a major contributor to the four-volume Encyclopedia Latina.

Well-traveled through the Americas, Miller has taught writing workshops in four countries and his books have been published in Europe and Latin America as well as the United States. In recognition of his work the University of Arizona Library has acquired Miller's archives and mounted a major exhibit of the author's papers. He has been affiliated with that school's Latin American Area Center since 1990, and makes his home in Tucson with his wife Regla Albarrán. www.tommillerbooks.com

Our Town First Stages Project (1939-1940)

2012-02-17T22:00:34Z

Was Our Town in YOUR town?
Join us in celebrating the 75th Anniversary of Our Town with

Thornton Wilder's Our Town was produced 658 times in the first 20 months in the United States and Canada after the Broadway production closed in 1939. We found a list of the communities in which these first productions were mounted, but it identifies only the city (or town), state and month and year.

This is where YOU come in: Find out if your home city or town may have hosted a production of Our Town between 1939-1940!

Type Our Town in the box below, along with your location, and click 'Search.'

For example, type in Our Town Fargo ND to find that a production of Our Town was mounted there in February of '39.

If it turns up, we invite you to do some digging at your local library and online!

From the name of the theatre, to the performance dates, names of the director, cast and crew, to images from the program or poster for the production, and of course, reviews, we'd love to find out more about Our Town in your town as part of the 75th Anniversary Celebration in 2013.

As this information is sent to us, we will put it on the website and begin to build an individual page for each production. Please send all information to Programs Director Rosey Strub: rosey@thorntonwilder.com.

Theatre Review: "Starkly Sublime" Our Town at The Broad Stage

2012-01-23T12:43:12Z

By Charles McNulty
For The LA TIMES
Grover's Corners, the fictional New Hampshire community of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," uncannily resembles our neck of the woods in David Cromer's starkly sublime and strikingly unsentimental revival, which opened Wednesday at the Broad Stage with Oscar-winner Helen Hunt assuming the role of the Stage Manager.

It's a safe bet that Chicago and New York audiences saw their own reflections when incarnations of this purposefully unadorned production took those cities by storm. Landscape obviously has nothing to do with it. This is a play that has forsworn realistic scenery and props, so there are no purple sunsets or hints of the San Gabriel Mountains off in the distance.

How then does Cromer make us believe that this "Our Town" is really our own? For one thing, you can't help being aware of your fellow theatergoers. The house lights are blazing throughout much of the show and the rectangular playing area, lying between two opposing sets of bleachers and chairs (the Broad has been especially reconfigured for this production), has the effect of subtly incorporating the audience into the acting company.

For another, the production is performed in contemporary clothing you might throw on for a trip to the mall or a movie. There's no striving for early 20th century New England manners or mores. The Gibbs and Webb families, whose interwoven fate makes up this three-act drama about the mournful beauty of everyday life, wouldn't seem out of place at Olive Garden or P.F. Chang's.
There's certainly nothing old-fashioned about the way the siblings scream and tussle -- or how their parents reprimand them. Lori Myers, one of several original cast members, lends Mrs. Gibbs a contemporary Midwestern tone that recalls Laurie Metcalf at her most exasperated. And Jeff Still as Doc Gibbs and Tim Curtis as Editor Webb might very well be standing on line with you at Home Depot.

In short, there's no escape from the familiarity and immediacy of this world.

Although there are several sharply distinctive performances (James McMenamin's sweet but slightly slow George Gibbs being the most original), the acting isn't what distinguishes Cromer's production. In fact, the roughness of the playing style can take some getting used to. When Myers' Mrs. Gibbs and Kati Brazda's Mrs. Webb busily and rather bafflingly mime their household chores early in the first act, I was reminded of Wilder's suggestion that the actors in these roles turn their backs to the audience so as not to "distract and provoke" with their puzzling displays of cooking and washing up.

Cromer, for the most part, takes what Wilder describes as the play's "scorn of verisimilitude" quite seriously. Emily, the notably bright Webb daughter whose romance with George is recollected in the second act, is played by Jennifer Grace, an astringent actress who hardly seems like a teenager. The piano used in the raucous choir practice scene is called an organ. And there's little attempt, beyond the presence of two wooden tables, of establishing an interior outline of these domestic lives.

Somewhat more daringly, the director stands behind Wilder's belief that the occasional amateur note can deepen the artistic experience. Several of the supporting performers, for instance, have a raw quality that dissolves the distinction between us (the audience) and them (the actors). Wilder, who set out to show "the life of the village against the life of the stars," wants us to feel implicated in this story, and Cromer employs a new palette to achieve this end.

No one thinks of "Our Town" as avant-garde anymore. How could this homespun staple of American drama, so beloved by community and student theater groups, be remotely considered experimental? Yet when the play first appeared in 1938 at Princeton's McCarter Theatre, it was thought to be groundbreaking, and Wilder himself was aware that the "new bold effect in presentation-methods" was a crucial part of its interest.

Cromer comes up with surprises that may startle traditionalists. The casting of Hunt -- one of several replacements for Cromer, who initially played the part of the Stage Manager during the production's record-breaking New York run as well as during its world premiere in Chicago -- is the least of them. Hunt's manner is so confident and smooth as she strides about the length of the stage playing, pausing and fast-forwarding the action that gender never becomes an issue.

The final act, however, contains a theatrical coup that, while flying in the face of the stage directions, presses upon us with new weight the haunting grace of the play's postmortem ending. It would be unfair to give this away, but let me just say that the actors who portray the assembled graveyard dead are positioned in such a way to magnificently symbolize the background of patient eternity on which our lives fleetingly unfold.

But perhaps the biggest shocker of this "Our Town" is its refusal to bask in amber glows, wallow in folksy sentiments or indulge in shopworn sermonizing. Admittedly, the production's power would be greater in a more intimate space. Still, this is a stunning theatrical achievement. Cromer throws dazzlingly harsh light on the truth that's been there all along yet is always such a challenge to see.

Photos: Upper: Helen Hunt. Lower: James McMenamin and Jennifer Grace.
Credit: Iris Schneider

Talk of latest 'Our Town' full of raves

2012-01-09T12:51:03Z

'Our Town' director David Cromer was unprepared for the strong positive reaction to his version of Thornton Wilder's play with Helen Hunt as Stage Manager, coming to the Broad Stage on Jan. 18.

By Margaret Gray, Special to the Los Angeles Times

David Cromer never set out to make anybody cry.

"It's not the hardest thing in the world to make people cry. You can make people cry if you play 'Danny Boy,'" says Cromer, director of the production of "Our Town" that will open at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica on Jan. 18, starring Helen Hunt as the Stage Manager.

So he didn't anticipate the strong emotions his pared, intimate staging of Thornton Wilder's American classic would provoke first in Chicago ("utterly astounding," said Tribune critic Chris Jones) and then off-Broadway at the Barrow Street Theatre, where, to critical raves and word-of-mouth testimonials about its cathartic powers, it officially became the longest-running production in the play's 72-year history, with more than 500 performances.

That record was previously held by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway production in 1938, which had 336 performances. Since then, "Our Town," a staple of regional theaters and high school drama clubs (large cast, minimal scenery), is often regarded as a folksy period piece, an homage to small New England towns and homespun values -- not so much as must-see radical theater.

Cromer had no intention of breaking records or starting perceptual revolutions.

"I'm a freelance director, I was offered this job, and so I did it. You don't know you're going to end up in a really long, complicated relationship with a play. You'll go, 'Eh, I'll do this job,' and you get through it."

Looking back, though, you can sometimes see the seeds of a great romance destined to blossom.

"A good friend of mine, the actor Ian Westerfer, saw an early preview in Chicago," Cromer recalls. He developed the production there with the company the Hypocrites, who perform in a cozy basement space at Wicker Park's Chopin Theatre.

"We were just furious at Ian because he was laughing and cackling and guffawing. And we're up there acting our ... off. Then lights come up and we realize that he's blubbering, red-faced, with projectile tears," Cromer says. "We're like, 'Oh. Wow, wow, wow. What the ...?"

Cromer, 47 and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, is at least a finalist for the smartest person in any room. Even his habitual self-deprecation can seem like a form of noblesse oblige. He has a prickly, unsentimental attitude to his work and reacts somewhat irritably to suggestions that his widely admired directorial approach was anything more than a respectful reading of the play.

"The design team and I felt like Wilder's intent was to get rid of artifice, which is why he did things that were relatively radical in 1938 on Broadway: no scenery, a very casual conversational feel."

Cromer's choices, including playing the Stage Manager himself in the initial productions, may have struck traditionalists as bold and edgy, but for him they emerged from the same impulse.

"I wasn't really directing myself because I wasn't really acting," he explains. "The Stage Manager comes out and sets up the play to the audience very straightforwardly: 'We're in the town of Grover's Corners, the train tracks are over there, etc.' It felt artificial to hire an actor to run the evening, and I thought, what if I just did it myself since I was doing it anyway, and that would erase one more layer of artifice."

After a while, though, in New York, "The play kept running, and I had to leave. And while my conceit was very clever, having better actors in the part actually improves the evening."

Replacement Stage Managers during the New York run included Michael Shannon, Michael McKean and Hunt, who is reprising the role here.

"People think the Stage Manager should have a pipe and elbow patches," says Hunt, who while not the first female Stage Manager in "Our Town" history is definitely part of a select group. But she and Cromer stress that his decision to cast her was, as Hunt phrases it, "pure and not some cool, flashy idea."

"I have to say that I had not been that open to the idea of a woman doing it prior to Helen coming up, which I know is a terrible thing to admit," Cromer says. Pressed about why, he shrugs and says, "I don't know." He ultimately offers, "I guess there's something that seems male to me in the emotional recalcitrance of the part."

"But when Helen came up, I realized it was just that no one had suggested the right person. She has that dry wit, that great, dry wit."

Hunt is an "Our Town" veteran, having played Emily in a production at Lincoln Center with Spalding Gray as the Stage Manager in 1989. When she saw Cromer's production in New York, as she puts it, she "had to be carried out sobbing." She called him to express her admiration, but it wasn't until about a year later that some lighthearted jokes turned into a serious offer.

She recalls, "I said, 'Are you sure?' Because the unadorned quality of the production is what allows the work to come through, and am I going to 'adorn' it in some way, being a girl, and one who's well known? What gives me the authority to come out and say these words?"

"And he said, 'You have the authority because you love it, because you have a strong feeling about it, and because you have something you want to say about it.'"

No text was changed to reflect the Stage Manager's new gender identity, but Hunt, 48, who has a daughter, Makena Lei, and a stepson, Emmett, with her partner Matthew Carnahan, interprets the role in a distinctly maternal light.

"If you run the play through the filter of mothering, aging, being a girl, having a girl, all these things start to pop out of the play, and when David does it, other things pop out."

"People who had never seen the play before told me, 'I don't understand how it was not played by a woman your age. It seems to have so much to say about what it means to be a mother every day.' My friends said they ran home afterward and looked their kids in the eye, because of the scene where Emily begs her mother, 'Just look at me one minute.' You go home and you stare at your kids as hard as you can."

Hunt, best known for her Emmy-winning role on "Mad About You" and her Oscar-winning performance in "As Good as It Gets," has kept a lower profile since the 1990s. She wrote and directed the movie "Then She Found Me" (2007) and is increasingly returning to her stage roots, not only acting but working behind the scenes to make productions happen. She was a major force behind the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles' "Much Ado About Nothing" last December at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, in which she starred as Beatrice. And she was also instrumental in bringing "Our Town" to the L.A. area.

"I really wanted people I care about here to see this. There's a world of smart, artistic people here, in my neighborhood, in my "Our Town." I had begun to talk to Dale [Franzen, Broad stage director] about how I live here [on the Westside], and I want to be part of a theatrical community.

"I initially thought we could go in the smaller space [The Edye Second Space]," Hunt says. "Then David came out with the designer and they got very excited about how they might re-imagine the show on the main stage."

Cromer says, "Wilder goes back and forth between looking at very intimate, close-up details of human life and then pulling back to say, 'We are specks in this universe.'" Although the Broad's stage and seating will be reconfigured to create the intimacy of the original production, "the big, cathedral-like space offers us this sense of theater as a universe around something small."

Cromer, who has never worked in L.A. before, acknowledges that there's some pressure. "It's difficult to deal with how praised this thing has been," he says, cautioning, "I mean, the Messiah has not arrived. It's merely an evening in the theater."

"It has always been our intention to get out of the way of the play, and I think we can trust the play is going to work, and I hope people will enjoy it. I am terrified, yes, but there's nothing we can do about it except take our chance."

'Skin of Our Teeth' brings humor to universal dramas

2011-12-08T20:27:33Z

By Matthew Hauptman
The Miscellany News

Above, the talented cast of "The Skin of Our Teeth," a radical play written in 1942 by Thornton Wilder, rehearses in the Martel Theatre.

Thornton Wilder's 1942 play "The Skin of Our Teeth" resonated with theatergoers looking toward an uncertain future--a future marked by economic depression, global war and eventual recovery.

"There is a universality to Wilder's work that allows this play to become deeply personal, as if the situations on stage could play out anytime, anywhere," wrote Akari Anderson '12, who plays character Sabina, in an emailed statement. "The Skin of Our Teeth" will be performed at the Martel Theatre from Dec. 8 to 10 at 8 p.m.

Christopher Grabowski--professor of Drama on the Frances Fergusson Chair of Arts and Humanities, director of Theater, and chair of Drama--is directing the play. Grabowski chose "The Skin of Our Teeth" largely because he was struck by its relevance to the present day, never having read the play before.

Grabowski explained that this play demonstrates a keen understanding of what it means and feels like to live on the brink of crisis and disaster. The play does entail some rather bleak themes but is also rife with hope, not to mention humor. As Grabowski said of Wilder, "He was an optimist at heart. He believed that progress was possible."
Wilder's play tells the story of George and Maggie Antrobus; their two children, Henry and Gladys; and Sabina, the family's maid in the first and third acts, and a beauty queen temptress in the second act. Many of the characters in "The Skin of Our Teeth" adopt dual roles like Sabina, making her transition not unusual for the experimental play.
The play's action takes place during the period in which it was written--the early 1940s--but is full of allusions and anachronisms that invoke biblical and mythological canons. Accordingly, the characters' roles as archetypes are emphasized by their association with biblical and classical personalities.

Wilder's play is deeply immersed in the canon, but also pays homage to a variety of traditions other than the Judeo-Christian. In other words, while Wilder may have hailed from a Christian background, he saw the Bible as one mythology amongst thousands. His efforts to engage with the past, moreover, do not constitute an effort to rewrite it.
As Arianna Gass '13, another cast member, wrote in an emailed statement, "Even though Wilder's theatrical language is subversive (in the sense that it revolts against classical modes of representation), I don't think his message is."

Added Gass, "The play is about learning how to begin again--not by rewriting those classic and sacred texts, but by learning from them, acknowledging that the knowledge they contain is relevant even thousands of years after they were written; that by being human we have a cultural heritage, and it's influence is ultimately creative and positive."
Wilder's optimism is evident in his witty (and frequently absurd) dialogue, but also in his oscillations between sincerity and silliness. "[This play] turns on a dime sometimes," said cast member Steven Wolff '13.

If Wilder's writing is distinct and unique in its light touches, then it is also recognizable in its unorthodox nature. As Gass pointed out, "A lot of his plays are 'metatheatrical'--they draw attention to the spectacle in progress. Just as you are pulled in to the emotion or plot of the scene, Wilder draws you out. This is, in part, what keeps his plays from being hokey, sentimental."

This is most evident in the characters' awareness of their own presences on stage. Throughout "The Skin of Our Teeth," characters directly address the audience and make quips about the play of which they are a part. "There's [this] huge sense of whimsy in it," said Assistant Director Cat Ramirez '13.

"The Skin of Our Teeth" may be experimental, but it is still very much in line with Wilder's other plays. As Gass argued, "This play is not only continuous with his other works, but could be characterized as the culmination of his creative endeavors."

Wilder's fear that "The Skin of Our Teeth" would be his last play before going to war as a lieutenant colonel may shed light on the play's cumulative quality. As Anderson noted, "This play was being written on the eve of the Second World War, and you can definitely feel the text grappling with issues of war and humanity during times of crisis."

The play has been challenging but immensely rewarding for the cast and crew. Emily Wexler '14, who plays Gladys Antrobus, felt heartened watching this large-scale collaboration come to fruition.
"We've created a real theatrical community," Wexler said. This theatrical community has entailed a committed group of students and faculty working together to create great art. "One of the most amazing parts of working on this show has been getting to work with faculty members, who have pulled out all the stops in terms of design."
As Anderson went on to add, "Their attention to detail is incredible, and [Drama Department Technical Director] Paul O'Connor's set design has really been a huge part in giving us a zany, larger-than-life world to play in. Chris has really brought out the bold theatricality of the piece, which is incredibly rewarding as an actor. The show never stops moving, and neither do we--it's really been a lot of fun."
The play has certainly been fun for all those involved but also quite challenging, not least because of its complexities and nuances. "[The Skin of Our Teeth]" is so dense and rich that we keep finding more and more layers to peel back, which is challenging, but has kept us engaged in the piece as we discover central themes together," remarked Anderson.
"This production is wildly imaginative, fun and otherworldly, but also presents a very real humanity that I think the audience will recognize."
Said Grabowski, "The story is absolutely basic to who we are."

New York City's unusual Long Christmas Dinners: Celebrations of Life in Two Historic Locations

2011-11-29T17:56:10Z

This holiday season, New York City audiences can look forward to two distinct productions of The Long Christmas Dinner dished up in two deliciously varied locations. The play, one of Wilder's most ingenious and celebrated pieces of short drama, is a bitter-sweet and loving depiction of four generations of the Bayard family spread across nine decades. All of the action occurs at the dining room table.

On the Upper East Side:
The Fundamental Theater Project at Holiday House

On three afternoons between December 2nd and 9th, the grand dining room of New York City's Holiday House will play host to a site-specific production of The Long Christmas Dinner by NYC-based trans-Atlantic theater company, Fundamental Theater Project (FTP). All performances will benefit the Greater New York affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

FTP's production marks the first performance of its kind in the 1913 Upper-East-Side Mansion, a show house currently featuring the work of top international designers. Holiday House, which endeavors to celebrate life through their various exhibits, provides a wonderfully appropriate venue for a play about a Dinner. FTP and director Sam Underwood chose to produce Wilder's 1931 play in this space because of this synergy between House's mission and the themes of the play.

For their current exhibit, Holiday House asked each designer to select a holiday or a special moment in life as an inspiration for their design. Felicia Zwebner of Felicia Zwebner Design created the dining room in which performances of The Long Christmas Dinner will take place.

FTP's cast includes Byron Anthony, Spencer Aste, Nehassaiu deGannes, Margaret Ladd, Nicola Murphy, Sophie Sorensen, Rony Stav, Sam Underwood and Harlan Work.  Fundamental Theater Project's mission is to create opportunities for emerging artists to collaborate with established professionals. Recent productions include 3-D Hamlet at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Trans-Euro Express at the Irish Arts Center. Guest artists have included Alec Baldwin, Scott Adsit, Anthony Rapp, Simon Callow, and Michael Emerson. www.fundamentaltheaterproject.com

If you go:
Where: New York City's Holiday House, 2 East 63rd Street 

When: Friday, December 2nd, Thursday, December 8th and Friday, December 9th; All performances begin at 2pm. 

Tickets: The cost of admission to Holiday House is $30, which includes admission to a performance of The Long Christmas Dinner. All proceeds will benefit the Greater New York City Affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure®. Holiday House Hours are 11am-5pm. For more information: www.holidayhousenyc.com

And In Brooklyn: Brave New World Rep at The Old Stone House  

Brave New World Repertory Theatre and The Old Stone House of Brooklyn will be treating their Brooklyn neighbors to something very special on December 18th: Four FREE performances of Thornton Wider's classic one-act play, The Long Christmas Dinner. Each performance will be preceded by a complimentary holiday buffet, prepared and served by the BNW company and volunteer supporters.

The family will be portrayed by a black cast at 2pm and 6pm and a white cast at 4pm and 8pm -- representing two culturally different American families spanning the same century of time, and sharing the same basic human experiences of life and death, love, loss and family

The theatre is located in a reconstructed 1699 Dutch farmhouse that was central to the Battle of Brooklyn. The Old Stone House also features a museum and community resource that explores the American Revolution, colonial life and Brooklyn.

The show is produced and directed by Claire Beckman and the cast includes Mark August, Cynthia Babak*, Alice Barrett-Mitchell*, Ezra Barnes*, Ghyllian Bell, David Fruktkoff*, Amanda Gookin, Alvin Hippolyte, Warren Jackson*, Kristin Janine, Quanda Johnson*, Chris Lindsay-Abaire*, Lizan Mitchel*, Linda Powell*, Eleanor Ruth*, Caroline Ryburn*, Franny Silverman*, Lindsay Smiling*, Curtis Stewart, Byron Walker, David Warfield*. Costumes designed by Martina Nevermann and the production stage manager is Stephanie Boyd.

*Members of Actors Equity Association.

About Brave New World Repertory Theatre
Over the past eight years around the borough, BNW has carved out a site-specific niche presenting To Kill a Mockingbird on the front porches of a tree-lined Ditmas Park street, On The Waterfront on a Brooklyn barge that toured the waterfronts of New York Bay, The Tempest on the beach and boardwalk in Coney Island, and The Crucible by lantern light for 2 weeks at The Old Stone House in Park Slope. BNW inaugurated Brave New World's Shakespeare Festival at The Prospect Park Pavilion with free staged readings of As You Like It. Based in Brooklyn, Brave New World Repertory has been a featured favorite of Celebrate Brooklyn at the Prospect Park band shell, presenting acclaimed productions of Fahrenheit 451, The Great White Hope and Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, based on Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

BNW's 2010-2011 season has included acclaimed two-week runs of The Halloween Plays in collaboration with Company XIV, and Arthur Miller's The American Clock at The Brooklyn Lyceum.

If you go:
Where: The Old Stone House of Brooklyn JJ Byrne Park, 5th avenue between 3rd and 4th Streets

When: 4 Performances on December 18th 

Dinner 1:30pm and Performance 2pm
Dinner 3:30pm and Performance 4pm
Dinner 5:30pm and Performance 6pm 
Dinner 7:30pm and Performance 8pm 

Tickets: Tickets for all 4 performances and dinner vouchers will be distributed beginning at 12noon outside the Old Stone House at the rear 4th Avenue entrance between 3rd and 4th streets in Park Slope. No reservations will be taken, except for VIP reservations for Seniors.

The event is supported in part by grants from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and The Brooklyn Community Foundation. Seating is extremely limited and people are advised to arrive early.

World-renowned Georges Lavaudant directs Our Town at Stanford

2011-11-09T20:06:14Z

BY CYNTHIA HAVEN
for Stanford University News

"Why don't we do something in America?" the famous French director asked Stanford's Jean-Marie Apostolidès over dinner in Paris. So Georges Lavaudant came to Stanford to direct "Our Town."

It's been called the greatest American play ever written, but Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer-prize-winning Our Town is too often treated like a hoary old chestnut, the staple of high school drama departments.

The renowned French director Georges Lavaudant, in collaboration with Stanford French professor Jean-Marie Apostolidès, will put a new twist on the familiar tale. The Stanford Drama Department's Our Town will be performed at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 9, through Saturday, Nov. 12, in the Pigott Theater.

"We've never invited a theater director of this stature to produce a show at Stanford," said Apostolidès. This month alone, he said, Lavaudant, most recently director of the Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe, has engagements at the Louvre and the Paris Opera.

The collaborative Stanford gig was born of their friendship. The two were having a long dinner in Paris, talking about the possibility of working together on a production. Lavaudant asked, "Why don't we do something in America?" Apostolidès replied that the only venue he could offer was at Stanford, working with student performers.

"He said, 'Let's do it,'" said Apostolidès. "I thought he was only drunk. Of course he was drunk, but he said it again when he was sober."

"Ultimately, we did it. I'm very proud of it," he said. Apostolidès, who has been Lavaudant's "dramaturge and assistant - a little bit more than that," said he is pleased to participate in making "something strong for Stanford."

Our Town is more a mystery play than merely a familiar chunk of Americana. It illuminates our casual waste of time, our preoccupation with the trivial, and the eternity that underlies our least utterances - all through the psychological scrim of a Norman Rockwell painting.

On the surface, at least, what play could be more American?

Apostolidès agreed that he thought so, too - in the past. "But now I'm convinced that something different can happen. I would not see this production as totally America - it's the middle of nowhere. I'm convinced this production brings out things that are in the play and that haven't been seen before."

At a rehearsal, Lavaudant is a restless, dominating presence, attentive and intense. Frowning slightly as he listens, he instructs the cast in a mixture of French and English. When he lapses into French, a student rushes in to provide a quick translation.

"Our production will sever the connection with a precise history as well as realism. It is built on a different conception of what theater is," Ladauvant said on the website of the French Consulate in San Francisco.

He intends his production "to enhance the poetic dimension of the play in order to reveal its universal dimensions." He added modestly, "We hope that our audience will be willing to follow us on our iconoclastic path."

According to Apostolidès, "He wants constantly to do new things. It's an atmosphere of excess, trying to get the best out of everyone, and himself. He expects people to go beyond their limits. It's worth it, because you have the feeling you are working with a genius."

Michael Taymor, a Palo Alto pediatrician - and brother of Broadway director and choreographer Julie Taymor - has composed music for the production, which will include songs and dances. Dancer Aleta Hayes, a lecturer in the Drama Department, is the choreographer.

In Act III, the dead of the play's mythical city, Grover's Corners, are consigned not to heaven or hell or purgatory, but instead a grim, yet luminous, waiting, waiting . . . for what?

Wilder had been a student of the Greek and Roman classics, and his afterworld is akin to the Greeks', where the dead are shadows of their former selves, reflecting on their lives. What kind of world was Wilder trying to create?

"What is amazing is that he wrote the third act when he was in Switzerland," said Apostolidès, where Wilder was immersed in Marx and Nietzsche. "Yet it's not there at all." Such is the world of Wilder - a world of the mind as much as of observation.

The Soviet Union stopped a 1946 production of Our Town in the Russian sector of occupied Berlin, claiming the drama was too depressing and might inspire a wave of suicides.

Elsewhere, it has left audiences rapt with the wonder of the everyday.

Maybe Nietzsche, who wrote The Birth of Tragedy, found his way into Wilder's Our Town after all. Nobody famous ever came out of Grover's Corners, Wilder writes in the play.

"Can we create tragedy with people who are not very remarkable?" asked Apostolidès. "It's a challenge, and Thornton Wilder does it."

http://drama.stanford.edu

Interview with Christopher Wheatley, author of Thornton Wilder and Amos Wilder: Writing Religion in Twentieth-Century America

2011-11-04T18:53:36Z

Forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press in November 2011, Christopher J. Wheatley's new book Thornton Wilder and Amos Wilder: Writing Religion in Twentieth-Century America is the first to explore the relationship between Thornton's work and his brother Amos's biblical and literary scholarship. Ordinary Professor of English at the Catholic University of America, Wheatley is currently on a year-long sabbatical editing an old-spelling anthology of drama in English from the medieval period to the early twentieth century. Edyta Oczkowicz, Thornton Wilder Society Newsletter Editor, caught up with Wheatley at the recent ALA conference in Boston where he presented a paper on "Wilder's Post-WWII One-Act Plays and the Idea of the Divine in the World and Word."

EO: One of the reviewers said that your "book is impressive for its reading of the Wilders in the context of both pre-modern and modern literature." How do you see Thornton Wilder in relationship to modernism and especially to American modernist writers like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, or Stein?

CW: There is more than one kind of modernism in my view. Sinclair Lewis was very much a man of the twentieth century in his ideas, but he writes his novels in an essentially nineteenth-century form: realism. T. S. Eliot and Allen Tate use avant-garde poetic forms to embody fairly traditional religious ideas. Gertrude Stein writes ringing defenses of conventional morality in a novel about lesbians in the early twentieth century. I have a problem with literary categories like Modernism: they tend to short-circuit thought.

EO: Do you see any significant interplay of religion and modernism in Thornton Wilder's work?

CW: Insofar as I see a relationship between modernism and religion in Wilder's work, I think people should read the late Tom Singer's article about Wittgenstein, Joyce and Modernism. "Significant" language, according to Wittgenstein, cannot really talk about religion, aesthetics, ethics, and yet those are the things that most matter. Form points to what positivism cannot handle, hence the radical form of Joyce whom Thornton Wilder admired deeply.

EO: Both brothers were accomplished writers, Thornton in drama and fiction, and Amos in poetry. How were they alike in their thinking and writing? How did they differ?

CW: What both writers share is a keen interest in and attempt to understand God and Man in history. A recurring theme in Amos's work is that the Incarnation must be taken seriously, which means that while you cannot reduce Jesus to his historical period, Jesus's understanding of his own position is partially a function of what we call the Old Testament, of the prophetic impulse in Judaism, and partially a function of the Roman Occupation. Contrary to what some critics have argued, I think Thornton's works are usually very much concerned with values in history, and how people respond and adapt to their historical periods. I should stress that while I talk about Amos's poetry some, what I mostly examine is his scholarship on the New Testament and his critical analyses of twentieth-century literature.

EO: When speaking of adapting to one's historical period and the impact different experiences had on the brothers, how were they influenced by their different engagement in WWI, for example? Do you see any connection between their war experience and each brother's views on life and religion?

CW: Amos in particular was influenced by WWI. He volunteered as an ambulance driver and, when the U.S. entered the war, became an officer in the artillery. After the war he suffered from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. From this emerged his recurring argument that twentieth-century religious literature could not be composed out of nineteenth-century artistic genres and forms. Similar to, for instance, Virginia Woolf, he did not reject the religious literature of earlier periods, but he recognized it as not speaking to his experiences. Hence Amos's admiration of writers like Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren whose doubt he saw as more religious than expression of conventional piety. Thornton was more influenced by his service in WWII: his post-WWII works reveal a greater degree of skepticism about conventional religious ideas.

EO: So how would you describe Thornton Wilder's attitudes toward religion? How much did they change in the course of his life, throughout his works?

CW: The answer to that question is the whole book. I can't really give a thumbnail sketch, other than to say that Thornton never settled for moralism, and that America lacks a mythology that can explain itself to itself. He was interested in Catholicism, existentialism, and evolution at various times. The first three novels [The Cabala, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Woman of Andros] examine exhausted systems of belief in conflict with radical changes in thought. The works of the 1930s [e.g., his novel Heaven's My Destination] both criticize America and assert the need for piety (loyalty to those things to which one should be loyal) in the face of Great Depression and the looming world war. The post-war works [e.g., his novel The Eight Day] both examine the ways that conventional beliefs (among them religion) trap people and keep them from seeing their essential freedom, and explore a kind of purposive evolution that is fundamentally religious.

EO: If you were to name Thornton Wilder's most important innovation in his treatment of the religious theme in twentieth-century America, what would it be?

CW: The interest in ideas as shaped by history.

EO: Amazingly all Wilder children were published writers. Have you read any of the other Wilder siblings' writings and what possibilities do you see for further comparative study?

CW: In my book I talk about a couple of Isabel's novels and one volume of Charlotte's poetry. The latter in particular is interesting and I'm sure there's lots of room for further study.

EO: We look forward to reading your book.