Living With Books
HICKS, CRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks The Three Plays of Thornton Wilder, With His Own Enlightening Preface Unlike most of his contemporaries—O'Neill in particular—Thornton Wilder has written...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks The Three Plays of Thornton Wilder, With His Own Enlightening Preface Unlike most of his contemporaries—O'Neill in particular—Thornton Wilder has written plays that can be read with great satisfaction...
...It is peculiarly a pla\ for our times because it reminds us that our times are not peculiar...
...What he went on to show in The Skin of Our Teeth and The Matchmaker was that he could encompass in this style as wide an emotional range as could be found in any contemporary dramatist...
...That is not to say that he has a style of overpowering originality, a style such as Dylan Thomas's, for example...
...In The Skin of Our Teeth, "the events of our homely daily life—this time the family life—are depicted against the vast dimensions of time and place...
...Like the other plays, it emphasizes the continuity of human experience, but here we see...
...The plays are worth reading, in the first place, because Wilder is a master of our language...
...On the other hand, I had thought of The Matchmaker as a play to be seen, chiefly because it seemed to be carried by the brilliance of Ruth Gordon's acting...
...The colloquial style, which he first exploited in Heaven's My Destination, he employed in some of his later one-act plays and in the first of his long plays, Our Town...
...The traditional kind of stage production, he decided, stifled the life of drama In emphasizing the specific and the local, and he came to believe that in the 19th century the emergent middle class, out of its uncertainties and fears, had wanted life smothered...
...It was written on the eve of our entrance into the war and under strong emotion," Wilder says, "and I think it mostly conies alive under conditions of crisis.'' The second part of this statement, which he supports by a modest reference to the play's success in postwar Europe, is reasonable enough...
...but the whole point of the play is that the human species has spent most of its existence under conditions of crisis, and certainly we have known no other condition since the play was written...
...In everything he has written Wilder has shown himself a wise man and a resourceful artist, but it is in The Skin of Our Teeth that he speaks most directly and most compellingly to our imaginations...
...Our Town, it has been said, is more frequently produced by amateurs than any other contemporary play, and I surmise that it has more frequently been well produced, not merely because of its mechanics but also because of its spirit...
...What he made possible—and at the same time demanded —was the imaginative participation of his audience, and the reader takes great pleasure in this challenge...
...The others are to be found in Three Plays (Harper, $4.95), and anyone who has not read them will find them worth reading whether or not he has seen them on the stage...
...One would expect the play to read well, and it does...
...In the preface lie talks about what he was trying to do in each of the three plays the volume contains...
...To an extent this is true...
...It is, I believe, a great play...
...In The Merchant of Yonkers, which, "only slightly modified," became The Matchmaker, he tried "to shake off the nonsense of the 19th-century staging" by making fun of it, and at the same time to say something about "aspirations for a fuller, freer participation in life...
...not much of the hilarity of the performance can be found on the printed page...
...It is a style that delights the reader by virtue both of its lightness and of its resourcefulness...
...No more prolific as a dramatist than as a novelist, he has only four full-length plays to his credit, the fourth of which, A Life in the Sun, was staged at the Edinburgh Festival in 1955 but has not yet been produced or published in this country...
...But, freed from Miss Gordon's spell, I found more to think about than I had realized was there, and I acquired a new respect for the play...
...A second factor in the reader's enjoyment can be clearly understood in the light of the preface Wilder has written for this volume...
...The best of the plays, for seeing or reading, is The Skin of Our Teeth...
...On the contrary, although his early novels were written in a fastidious, almost precious style, he has in his later work developed such skill in the use of the vernacular that his writing seems almost effortless...
...The tragic had no heat...
...First in one-act plays, then in longer ventures, he tried "lo capture not verisimilitude but reality...
...as a constant ingredient of that experience, the struggle for survival against apparently hopeless odds...
...the comic had no bite...
...the social criticism failed to indict us with responsibility...
...He has not written many of them...
...In the late '20s, he tells us, he grew tired of the theater, for he found that he could not "believe" the plays he saw produced...
...In Our Town, using a stage that was almost bare, he attempted "lo find a value above all price for the smallest events of our daily lives...
Vol. 40 • October 1957 • No. 42
