The Long Christmas Dinner : From Page to Stage

The editors of this special issue of the Thornton Wilder Journal devoted to “Wilder and Music, ” featuring the libretto Wilder wrote for the opera version of The Long Christmas Dinner for which he collaborated with German composer Paul Hindemith, have asked me to open its pages with a few words of greeting. I am honored to do so. To carry out this assignment I have chosen to contribute (with some changes) the Note I wrote in 2014 for Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall program of the American Symphony Orchestra’s production of both the play and opera versions of The Long Christmas Dinner. The play was then eighty-three years old. The words and Afterword added here testify to its continuing presence on page and stage in what is now its ninety-fourth year. In visiting the subject of a one-act play, it is always useful to be reminded of David Ives’s comment in The Dramatist in 2006: “To my mind, the challenge of the one-act is even greater than the challenge of larger and messier plays, in the same way that the sonnet with only fourteen lines remains the ever-attempted Everest of poetry. ” I trust that this double duty of a Note for what I believe to be a dramatic sonnet can once again serve a useful purpose. The Long Christmas Dinner is one of six short plays by Thornton Wilder published jointly by major publishers in the United States and Great Britain in November 1931. The playwright was thirty-four years old and dividing his year between writing, lecturing throughout the country for two months each year under contract to a notable firm, and teaching comparative literature and composition part-time at the University of Chicago. Wilder’s one-act plays integrated different theatrical forms—from broad farce to satirical comedy, to tragedy to melodrama, to burlesque with touches of parody, irony, pathos, and comedy along the way. Wilder privately described three of the plays, The Long Christmas Dinner, The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, and Pullman Car Hiawatha, as his “cosmic ones. ” In these works he experimented with such dramatic techniques as smashing the fourth wall, pantomime, elimination of literal scenery, and a substitution of conventional plot-and-conflict structure. He also explored Everyman themes of birth, life, and death. Death was especially ever-present in these three works, particularly as a stalking presence at ninety years of meals around the same table in The Long Christmas Dinner. Wilder was still unknown to the public as a dramatist in 1931. He had wanted to be a playwright from an early age and published many short dramatic pieces as a student, including a full-length drama (which encountered an indifferent critical response Off-Broadway in 1926), and published a book of sixteen three-minute playlets in 1928 titled The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays. But this slender volume contained dramatic all-but-poetry designed not for performance but to be read in a comfortable chair before the fire. Our Town, his first full-length Broadway play and the work that opened the door to theatrical fame, still lay seven years in the future. His breakthrough into the world of literature came not through drama, but through the (hugely) best-selling novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, winner of Wilder’s first Pulitzer Prize in 1928. As a result of this blockbuster event that made him a wealthy man and turned him into a celebrity with an enormous public following, Wilder had no trouble finding important publishers only too happy to feed his fans with titles, whatever their content, title, or genre, even short plays. The publication of The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act is a case in point. It featured an unusual joint publication (using shared plates) between Yale University Press (a 525-copy limited signed boxed edition on special paper for 12. 00 designed by Yale’s internationally regarded printer, Carl Purlington Rollins) and a 2. 50 reader’s edition from Coward-McCann with an exciting and powerful modernist cover contributed by graphic artist Arthur Hawkins Jr. Absent research that will probably never be conducted, it can be safely proposed that no volume of one-act plays in twentieth-century American drama received a greater red carpet roll-out. Wilder’s sister, Isabel Wilder, helping her brother with contractual details and herself a recent graduate of Yale’s new School of Drama, was nervous about charging 2. 50 for a book of plays, the price typically for novels. But the publisher, no doubt with The Bridge of San Luis Rey in mind, assured her that “the book is for a reading public rather than particularly for a public interested in one-act plays for dramatic purposes. ”Wilder appears never to have been unhappy about the way his early drama was introduced to the world. He viewed his playlets and short plays as literature. So it is not surprising that in 1947 he selected the distinguished German translator of his fiction and nonfiction to translate his one-acts, rather than the well-known translator of his major dramatic works: “I have never regarded the shorter plays as really practical drama, but as belles-lettres, ” he said at the time. Despite the onset of the Great Depression, Wilder’s 1931 dramatic contribution to belles-lettres sold well and attracted much thoughtful comment on both sides of the Atlantic. While Time magazine damned the book as limited to the “intelligentsia” and “affluent” and dismissed The Long Christmas Dinner as “Alice’s mad tea-party in Wonderland, ” the New York Times described the title play and several of its companion pieces as “very near to miniature masterpieces. ” The Scottish Stage hailed the works (especially the cosmic plays) and saluted Wilder as a writer “bound by no confines of nationality, ” possessing “the universal quality which is a greatness in itself. ” And while the plays were warmly praised for their literary value—with The Bridge mentioned routinely in reviews and notices—many critics were not above speculating about their prospects for the actual stage and Wilder’s suitability for longer plays. Charles Hanson Towne in The San Francisco Examiner had no doubt about what lay ahead tomorrow: “I venture to say, ” he wrote on 27 November 1931, “that all the amateur theatrical clubs throughout the length and breadth of our land will soon be seeking permission to perform most of the one-act plays in Thornton Wilder’s collection. ”It turned out that most of Wilder’s 1931 belles-lettres did indeed work well on the stage as well as on the page, with Wilder’s cosmic plays in the vanguard. The details of productions were now handled, for the first time in Wilder’s career, by the redoubtable dramatic licensing firm of Samuel French, the front door to the amateur theatrical marketplace and source of its signature acting editions. The pickings were enormous; far from the bright lights of Broadway, the short play claimed a significant piece of the action in academic institutions of all levels, community playhouses, and living rooms large enough to accommodate monthly gatherings of local play-reading groups. Wilder himself was responsible for testing this market by providing proof copies of his forthcoming six one-acts to directors of three undergraduate dramatic societies. As a result, within a month of the publication of The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act in November 1931, all six had had world premiere productions before full houses by earnest undergraduate actors from four schools on three stages. In a historic joint collaboration that attracted national attention, The Long Christmas Dinner was first produced on 25 November 1931, by the Yale Dramatic Association and the Vassar Philalethesis at Yale’s new University Theatre on York Street (with The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, Such Things Only Happen in Books, and Love and How to Cure It). The University of Chicago and Antioch College followed in chronological order with the premieres of the two remaining plays—Chicago with Queens of France, and Antioch with Pullman Car Hiawatha. To make a full evening, these two schools added The Long Christmas Dinner and Happy Journey to their programs. Faculty directors of all these productions were friends or professional acquaintances of the budding playwright and had been in touch with him starting in the summer of 1931. Eighty-three years and scores of performances presided over by Samuel French later, including radio and television credits for certain titles (including The Long Christmas Dinner), Wilder’s one-acts continue to flourish in the lively if rarely visible one-act amateur habitat. But their stature as timeless works of art that wrestle deeply with our humanity has also led to well-received professional productions Off-Broadway. The story of a very long Christmas dinner has also been translated into some seven languages and adapted as an opera. True, it has never played Broadway like The Happy Journey, which made it to the Cort Theatre as a curtain raiser in 1947. But tonight, The Long Christmas Dinner can claim the no less prestigious address of Lincoln Center, where we all have a seat at its table. The Long Christmas Dinner, in its own right as belles-lettres, performed play, source of inspiration for a world-class composer during Wilder’s lifetime, and inspiration for distinguished dramatists today (witness Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home and Noah Haidle’s Birthday Candles to cite two recent examples), is alive and well in a new century. In fact, the play returned close to Broadway on 10 November 2025, when a star-studded cast of actors, playwrights and citizens, among them Jim Parsons, Sarah Ruhl, Roslyn Ruff, and Chris Hayes, performed a staged reading of The Long Christmas Dinner at Symphony Space. This event, sponsored by the Public Theatre, celebrated the publication of HarperCollins’s new special edition of Our Town together with Wilder’s three 1931 one-act plays—The Long Christmas Dinner, The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, and Pullman Car Hiawatha. In a single volume, readers now have the opportunity to (re) visit Grover’s Corners alongside the short plays that inspired it. Distinguished playwright Sarah Ruhl, who performed two roles in the reading, is also the author of the Introduction to Our Town and the Cosmic One-Acts. With Sarah Ruhl, page and stage unite in a wonderfully appropriate tribute to a short work of art.