Word: wildernesses
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...they'll tell you he's a playwright. His Our Town, which premiered in 1938, has been performed more frequently than any other American play ever written. But ask theater folk to list a half dozen American dramatists and his name is unlikely to appear. Press them about Wilder and they'll tell you he's the novelist who wrote The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Wilder is a man of incredible learning in many subjects (such as the dating of Cope de Vega's early works, or Palestrina's technique of counterpoint), a master of classroom teaching...
STRATFORD, Conn--"There is no man in America whose words will carry farther around the earth." So wrote Archibald MacLeish, winner of three Pulitzer Prizes, about Thornton Wilder, also a triple Pulitzer recipient. Yet Wilder's position in letters remains perplexing, for he is, at 78, something of a homeless and neglected...
...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...