Thornton Wilder:
“Everybody has a right to their own troubles.”
Our Town
Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He gave us Our Town, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939. He was awarded two more Pulitzers: for the novel The Bridge Of San Luis Rey (1927) and for the play The Skin Of Our Teeth (1942).
Our Town, in case your local community theatre passed on producing it, is best known for its bare set, its plain folksy dialogue, and its simplistic lessons about life. Yet, when the dead Emily Gibbs asks the character of the Stage Manager if anyone appreciates the daily mundane aspects of life, his answer is devastating. 80+ years after it debuted, it is believed that not a day goes by that Our Town is not being performed somewhere in the world. It has been adapted for film, radio and television, and in the lead role, at different times: Paul Newman, Hal Holbrook, Spalding Grey, Helen Hunt and Frank Sinatra. It has been made in to a musical three times, plus an opera and a ballet. Our Town has been translated into more than 70 languages. The 1940 film version features William Holden who was also born this day.
Near the end of Our Town, the character Emily Gibbs, now dead, says:
“Goodbye world, goodbye Grover’s Corners, good-bye Mama and Papa, goodbye taste of coffee, goodbye new ironed dresses goodbye clocks ticking and hot baths, goodbye sleeping and waking. Oh life, oh life, you’re too wonderful. Why don’t we realize?“
She then turns to the stage manager and says:
“Does anybody do it? Does anybody really notice?“
The Stage Manager answers:
“Some do… Poets, saints, artists, but very few.“
I love this play so much. For no reason at all, in the the first summer of the plague (2020), I took my copy of the script off Gay Playwrights shelf and reread it in a single sitting. I cried buckets that afternoon to the alarm of my two terriers. I never really got Emily’s speech until now, in my 60s in the era of COVID. The play moves me in ways that it never could when I was in my 20s, 40s or 50s.
Our Town even has a gay character, Simon Stimson, the church organist, who is a sort of stand-in for the playwright.
The great theme of Wilder’s works is the lack of awareness about the daily comforts and tribulations of the short time we have on our pretty, spinning, blue orb. Put down your devices and recognize the beauty of all those tiny moments in life that are being passed by.
Wilder never publicly addressed it, but his gayness was a well-known secret in theatre circles. He was discreet and passed himself off as a “confirmed bachelor”. His longtime lover was Samuel Steward who wrote very famous and well-received gay erotica under the moniker Phil Andros. Andros’ books seem tame now, but in their time they were scandalous stuff. Wilder was introduced to Steward by their mutual friend Gertrude Stein who had a correspondence going with both men. They were all from Oakland/Berkeley.
One of my favorite roles was Horace Vandergelder in Hello, Dolly! at Seattle Civic Light Opera in the late 1980s. I also used a funny, grouchy monologue by the same character from the source material, The Matchmaker (1954), for auditions for a decade. It was a role that I was born to play: crusty, irascible, testy, vinegary, bearish, and unable to suffer fools gladly.
The Hello, Dolly! history is long, picturesque, and quite gay. John Oxenford‘s short farce A Day Well Spent (1835) had been adapted into a full length play entitled Einen Jux Will Er Sich Machen by Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy in 1842. Both writers were queer. In 1938, Wilder Americanized the Nestroy version and changed it into The Merchant Of Yonkers. The Broadway production was a dismal failure, running for just 39 performances.
17 years later, director Tyrone Guthrie (not gay) commissioned a new version of the play for his friend Ruth Gordon. Wilder extensively rewrote the piece and made the minor character of Dolly Gallagher Levi, a widow who brokers marriages and other transactions, the leading role. Wilder named this play The Matchmaker. Gordon went on to have a smashing success in the play in London and when it moved to Broadway the next year, Gordon won the Tony Award for playing the title role.
The charming 1958 film version starred Shirley Booth, Anthony Perkins (gay), Shirley MacLaine (loved by gays), Paul Ford, and Robert Morse.
In 1964, The Matchmaker became the Tony Award winner (what is gayer than a Tony Award? I am really going to miss the broadcast next month) winning musical Hello, Dolly! with a score by the late, very gay, Jerry Herman, starring gay icon Carol Channing. In addition to Channing, the role has been played by Gay Icons: Pearl Bailey, Phyllis Diller, Betty Grable, Martha Raye, Ginger Rogers, Ethel Merman (in her last appearance on Broadway), and Mary Martin in the original London production. A film version of the musical was released in 1969 starring Barbra Streisand (gays seem to really like her) in the lead role. Tom Stoppard (not gay) reworked the story once again, in 1981, as the farce On The Razzle. Did you follow all that?
The Matchmaker, The Skin Of Our Teeth and Our Town are astonishing plays. They were first produced in an era when most dramatic productions aspired to a kind of kitchen-sink naturalism that would distract audiences from the artificiality of theatre, yet here were plays that leapt across centuries, the divide between life and death, and with characters openly addressing the audience and acknowledging that they were in a play. Wilder predates Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett in his use of theatrical conventions: little or no sets, acts set in a graveyard, actors playing animals. He stops and bends time. And yet the plays entertain.
Wilder had the coolest friends. He hung out with Dorothy Parker, Willa Cather, Harpo Marx, Tallulah Bankhead and Montgomery Clift. I would like to have been at that party. Wilder left this world in 1975. He was 78 years old, taken in the very best way, asleep in his bed.
For his 125th birthday celebration, a revival of The Skin Of Our Teeth, featuring a mostly Black cast, and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, making her Boadway debut, open last year at Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center. Blain-Cruz:
“The Skin Of Our Teeth is a play for right now. It’s about a family that encounters the end of the world over and over and over again. To be on the brink of extinction – and not only survive but invent and laugh and live and learn – is extraordinary! I find that extraordinariness – the surreal nature of survival – manifested so incredibly in the Black experience, and it is why I’m so thrilled to bring this particular company of actors together for this production, with a cast that embodies the complexity that is America.”
The Skin Of Our Teeth won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize. It was directed by Elia Kazan. The play is a three-part allegory about the life of mankind, centering on the Antrobus family of the fictional town of Excelsior, New Jersey. The epic comedy broke nearly every established theatrical convention when it was first produced.
The original production starred Tallulah Bankhead, Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, and Montgomery Clift. When Bankhead left the production in March 1943, she was replaced by Miriam Hopkins. Hopkins replaced by Gladys George. For two performances, while George was ill, Lizabeth Scott, who had been Bankhead’s understudy, was called in to play the role. Originally billed in New York as “Elizabeth Scott”, she dropped the “E” before taking the role on a national tour, and it became her breakthrough role.
It had a London premiere in 1945, where it ran for 77 performances. It re-opened in London in 1946, running there for a further 109 performances. Both incarnations were by Laurence Olivier, and starring Vivien Leigh.
The phrase used as the title comes from the King James Bible, Job 19:20: “My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.“
