Word: wildered
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Wilder has written of his growing conviction that "the theater is the greatest of the arts." Over the years he has turned put a sizeable number of plays, running from three minutes to three hours. His position as a dramatist, however, rests largely on three full-evening works: Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth (a revival of which will open at the Colonial Theater in Boston on August 51, and The Matchmaker. A small number, to be sure: but Chekhov's rightly elevated rank as a dramatist tests on only four plays, while Webster, Wycherly, Sheridan, Beaumarchais, Biichner...
...heavy doses of nostalgia, sentimentality, and homespun platitudes. But if the realm of art is wide enough to contain such bleak and pessimistic views of man and the world as Shakespeare's King Lear, Sartre's No Exit, and Beckett's Endgame, then it is wide enough to contain Wilder's warm, gentle, compassionate and hopeful approach. Wilder early reacted against the tradition of naturalism, with its emphasis on the seamy and sordid side of life, and has by nature tended to look through rose-colored glasses. But anyone who can't tell the difference between Our Town...
...second kind of reaction against slice-of-life dramaturgy and realistic settings, Wilder dispensed almost entirely with scenery and props. "In a 1941 exposition of his theory of drama, he said a play should be aimed at the group mind and be based on pretense. Later he wrote that "the novel is preeminently the vehicle of the unique occasion, the theater of the generalized...
...belief that he could reach a wider audience by forcing each spectator to create his own setting from his imagination and his own personal experience, a more authentic reality thereby resulting. University was Wilder's goal, as he made clear near the conclusion of his off-the-cuff talk to 15,000 people at Harvard's 1951 graduation (at the end of which President Conant called Wilder's remarks "the most significant I have ever heard from an academic man on a commencement program"). Wilder stated: "All literature is one expression of one human life experience. And when James Joyce...
...Town Wilder brings the usually unseen Stage Manager on stage. We see him suggest the Locale--Grover's Corners. New Hampshire--by bringing in some plain wooden chairs and a couple of tables, to which are added, as needed, a plank and, for a second-story window scene, a pair of step ladders. The Stage Manager also narrates background for us, guides the players, bridges time gaps, comments on what happens, doubles as a druggist, minister and an unnamed the woman (in early drafts of the play he took on several of the children's roles to boot), and dismisses...