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Five short Thornton Wilder playlets, 4-8 minutes in length, will be presented from his collection The Angel That Troubled the Waters, a series of quirky looks at the minor characters in several biblical stories. The evening will also include a longer one-act play, Youth, from Wilder's collection, The Seven Ages of Man. Wilder believed theatre to be "the greatest of all the arts" and is known as one of America's greatest playwrights.
Performances are April 16 - 17 (Friday & Saturday) @ 7:00pm at the theatre at Studio Academy, 415 16th St. SW. There will be introductory comments prior to Saturday's show, at 6:30pm, and an informal discussion will follow that evening's performance. The plays themselves will be about an hour and fifteen minutes.
April 17 only: Introductory comments at 6:30pm, informal discussion following.
Tickets are $6 and available at the door.
 Read Summaries of the Plays (172KB)
Director's Notes:
"The production values that create the illusion of a real place are so common for us
that we hardly even notice them and we assume that they are a necessary part of
theatre, In fact, we
tend to assume that anything other than that is an attempt to create some 'weird avant-
garde business.' When in fact they are not necessary. Wilder goes back to a much older
idea about theatre: that it's the actors -- not the props, costumes and sets -- that tell the
story.
Rather than seeing actors as mere props in the hands of an all-powerful uber-director,
this approach recognizes the reality--that actors portray real people. This is among the
oldest approaches we know of--rediscovered and reconfigured in the twentieth century
by Stanislavsky, Strasberg and others.
And this approach is central to much of what we do in Words Players.
In most acting circumstances, it is appropriate for actors to feel like real
people to the audience. Most actors are naturally more comfortable in circumstances
which create an illusory world around them--whether the actors are connected with
their characters or not. Our approach to these plays--in keeping with Wilder's own
philosophy of theatre--requires actors to integrate their own characters in the plays in
ways that connect with the audience, whether or not we employ illusion-creating
devices like props and costumes.
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Imagine a Mount Rushmore for American playwrights located--why not--at 42nd Street and Broadway, the
crossroads of the world. We'd surely look up to admire Thornton Wilder's professorial head, along with the massive heads
of O'Neill, Miller and Williams. But would Wilder be the Teddy Roosevelt of Mount Rushmore? We don't question his
being there. We're just not quite sure why...
Why do we think Wilder is important? Why do we vaguely think he's middlebrow and then, as I did, become
overwhelmed by the sheer emotional size of Our Town...?
Thornton Wilder. What do we do with this man who was a playwright, novelist, actor, teacher, musician,
essayist, translator, adaptor, opera librettist and screenwriter...? This was a man who as a hobby-it had to be an act of
love-spent years dating the four hundred extant plays of Lope de Vega. This is a man whose nickname was The Library.
At his memorial service on January 18, 1976 (six weeks after his death on December 7, 1975), Ruth Gordon, his great
Dolly Levi, said in her tribute: "Somebody asked Garson Kanin where he went to college. He said he never did. He went
to Thornton Wilder."
- American playwright John Guare, in his introduction to The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume I
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