Word: wildernesses
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Plays for Bleeclcer Street (by Thornton Wilder). Art as wisdom is the special province of age. Whether the last quartets are Beethoven's or T. S. Eliot's, the artist as sage tries to transmute a quantity of experience into a quality of meaning, and answer ultimate questions. At the age of 64, a distinguished U.S. man of letters, Thornton Wilder, has embarked on such a summing-up in a cycle of 14 one-act jMays divided into two groups, "The Seven Ages of Man" and "The Seven Deadly Sins." The off-Broadway debut of three...
Childhood explores the shadowy fantasy life of youngsters and the bad phone connection between parent and child that keeps each from ever quite understanding the other. It shimmers with the subtle and subdued radiance of Our Town, the unique Thornton Wilder signature that no one else in the U.S. theater can convincingly forge. Two girls and a boy, aged 13, 10 and 8, play what Mother calls one of their "morbid" games, "Funeral." In the game, Father and Mother have died in a bloody accident, and the children gather in church to praise them with faint damns. Mother was nice...
...Three. A sort of Mack Sennett investigation of the situation in Berlin, conducted with a wham-bam abandon by Director Billy Wilder...
Composer and playwright met more than a decade ago when Hindemith was teaching at Yale. They discussed the possibility of setting one of Wilder's plays to music, but not until last year did Wilder finally get around to preparing the libretto of Christmas Dinner. He rewrote extensively, stripped some bits of characterization, but maintained the basic outline of his play, which recounts in one scene the 90-year chronicle of an American family...
Hindemith's greatest triumph was in making Wilder more believable: musically, the composer was often able to achieve rapid shifts in stage tempo and mood following a death or a birth with far more convincing effect than Wilder was able to achieve in plain prose. Critics hailed Christmas Dinner as first-rate opera, and the audience was clearly moved. "It certainly fits our family," muttered one damp-eyed woman as she left the hall...