"The Unerring Instinct" and Other Short Plays
Thornton Wilder One-Act Play Festival

Three of the plays deal with Wilder's exploration of human nature and our common failings and weakness. The Unerring Instinct demonstrates one - not very healthy - way in which we develop certainties about "truth" and about each other. The Marriage We Deplore demonstrates how sometimes the failings we most loathe in others are the very faults central to our own psyches. Such Things Only Happen in Books shows us an author casting about for some sort of realistic plot that doesn't involve the unrealistic soap opera mainstays - which the people around him are actually living.

We are also doing three very short plays from Wilder's The Angel That Troubled the Waters, a series of vignettes based on literary figures brought to improbable life in unexpected circumstances. In Proserpina and the Devil, marionettes intended to portray the mythological story of Proserpina's doom to spend half the year in the underworld married to its god, Pluto, get tangled with their operators, with the story and with each other. The Flight to Egypt centers on Hepzibah, the donkey that carried Mary and Jesus as they fled Herod's slaughter of the innocents. Centaurs brings playwright Henrik Ibsen together with the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as with one of Ibsen's dramatic characters come to life, the Collective Unconscious, the Nature of the Creative Impulse. Etc.

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