Last night I finished the last "kitchen book" (the ones I was going to read daily in the kitchen and didn't), specifically Thornton Wilder's Collected Plays & Writings on Theater. Final takeaway thought: Wilder is one truly versatile writer. I'll provide details later, but right now I want to start with an oddity about the book itself. A group of a dozen or so plays in Collected Plays & Writings on Theater is titled "Uncollected Plays." Cracked me up every time I checked to see if it really was the title. Doesn't that move us right on into a logic tangle much like Mellow's concern with posted-0-seconds-ago?
Anyway, I started reading with the belief that except for the indescribably powerful Our Town I didn't really like Wilder's stuff. Turns out I was wrong. Apparently I'm now old enough to understand and enjoy The Skin of Our Teeth. I strongly recommend that anyone who hasn't read those two since they were required reading in high school give them another try. Teeth has aged quite well and makes amazingly relevant comments on the thinking of today. Our Town? I was literally sobbing when I read Act III, as opposed to only misting up in the Paul-Newman-as-Narrator film version. And this I'm recommending? You betcha!
Other Wilder surprises were:
1) How much I liked two short plays in a group of plays entitled The Seven Ages of Man. In "Childhood" three children are always playing games about their parents being dead and making them orphans. Finally they pretend they're running away and board a bus where their father is the driver and their mother another passenger. The play presents some interesting observations about childhood and children's reactions to adults. Near the end, Dodie, the middle child, says, "The reason I don't like grown-ups is that they don't ever think any inneresting (sic) thoughts. I guess they're so old that they just get tired of expecting anything to be different or exciting." (page 614) I guess it does seem like that to a child, but if true, how sad. "Youth" takes place when a forty-something captain is shipwrecked on an island. At first I thought I'd found the original Gillian's Island, but it soon became clear I hadn’t. On the island everyone is killed at twenty-nine because the natives have no use for old people and see no value in them. The play's a nice piece on how the youth of one generation learns from the older members of the previous generations.
2) In a film version of Our Town, made in the 1940, Emily lives. Even worse, Thorton Wilder agreed to the change. In a letter to the director of the movie Wilder writes, "I think Emily should live. … In a movie you see the people so closely that a different relation is established. In a theatre they are halfway abstractions in an allegory; in the movie they are very concrete. So, insofar as the play is a generalized allegory, she dies—we die—they die; insofar as it's a concrete happening it's not important that she die; it's even disproportionately cruel that she die." (pages 680-681) Even though I understand the logic, I think I vehemently disagree. Now I'll go see if the film exists. Wilder went for the idea, and he was the author. (Added later; It's on my Netflix list. We'll see.)
3) Wilder also wrote a really good film script entitled Shadow of a Doubt. Very Hitchcockian. I'll also check on its existence. Just did so. Actually it does exist, was directed by Hitchcock—and I've seen it. Maybe I'll Netflix it again because I think the film ends differently. But then I had to check the end of the script the next day 'cause I didn't remember it. Maybe it's just a weak ending in both.
All in all, I like/appreciate Thorton Wilder a lot more now.
