Published: March 15, 2007
Type: Full-length Plays, Short Plays, Essays, Letters, and Screenwriting
Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays and Writings on Theater, takes the measure of his extraordinary career as a dramatist, beginning with his early expressionist experiments and daring one-act plays such as The Long Christmas Dinner and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, ranging through the full flowering of Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and The Matchmaker, and encompassing the intriguing dramatic projects of his later years, such as his adaptation of the ancient story of Alcestis (The Alcestiad) and plays written for dramatic cycles based on the Seven Deadly Sins and the varied ages of an individual’s life. Complementing the selection of plays is an illuminating group of essays that captures Wilder’s reflections on his plays and contains a revealing epistolary account of the film adaptation of Our Town, as well as evaluations of dramatists such as Sophocles, George Bernard Shaw, and the Austrian satirist Johann Nestroy (whose farce Einen Jux will er sich machen Wilder brilliantly transformed into The Matchmaker).
The book also includes scenes from The Emporium, an ambitious unfinished play that, emerging out of Wilder’s intense engagement with existentialist philosophy in the postwar years, imagines a Kafkaesque department store whose enigmatic activities are as inscrutable as the mysteries of life itself; and the complete screenplay Wilder wrote for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Shadow of a Doubt just before reporting for military service in 1942. Although faithful to the spirit of the film, the screenplay presented here restores Wilder’s original dialogue, some of which was altered for the movie. A study of family life, youthful illusions, and the desperation of a criminal on the run, the Shadow of a Doubt screenplay is a masterful exhibition of the art of suspense and taut dramatic storytelling, and is an essential part of Wilder’s oeuvre.
Table of Contents
The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays
– Nascuntur Poetae
– Proserpina and the Devil
– Fanny Otcott
– Brother Fire
– The Penny That Beauty Spent
– The Angel on the Ship
– The Message and Jehanne
– Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
– Centaurs
– Leviathan
– And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead
– Now the Servant’s Name Was Malchus
– Mozart and the Gray Steward
– Hast Thou Considered My Servant Job?
– The Flight into Egypt
– The Angel That Troubled the Waters
The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act
– The Long Christmas Dinner
– Queens of France
– Pullman Car Hiawatha
– Love and How to Cure It
– Such Things Only Happen in Books
– The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden
Our Town
The Skin of Our Teeth
The Matchmaker
The Alcestiad
The Drunken Sisters
Uncollected Plays
— The Marriage we Deplore
— The Unerring Instinct
— Scenes from The Emporium
— Plays for Bleecker Street
—- The Seven Deadly Sins
—— Bernice
—— The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five
—— A Ringing of Doorbells
—— In Shakespeare and the Bible
—— Someone from Assisi
—— Cement Hands
—- The Seven Ages of Man
—— Infancy
—— Childhood
—— Youth
—— The Rivers Under the Earth
Writings on Theater
— Foreword to The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays
— Notes for the Producer: The Long Christmas Dinner
— Notes for the Producer: The Happy Journey
— A Preface for Our Town
— Our Town: Story of the Play
— Our Town: Some Suggestions for the Director
— Our Town—From Stage to Screen: A correspondence between Thornton Wilder and Sol Lesser
— Preface to Three Plays
— Notes on The Alcestiad
— Noting the Nature of Farce
— Some Thoughts on Playwriting
— Richard Beer-Hofmann’s Jaakobs Traum
— Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex
— Forward to Three Comedies by Johann Nestroy
— George Bernard Shaw
Shadow of a Doubt
Chronology
Notes on the Texts
Notes
For further information on the works within Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays and Writings on Theater, please visit the Bibliography.
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