Event

An Evening of Thornton Wilder One-Acts

The Long Christmas Dinner: Covering a span of ninety years, a family confronts one of the most fundamental aspects of life: change. The family, whose ritual Christmas dinners begin in the late 19th century, are forced to deal with the forward momentum of Time; death, loss, love, heartbreak, regret, war, an ever evolving America, and the changing necessities of mores and relationships are at the core of Wilder's play.

Pullman Car Hiawatha: Set during a train trip from New York to Chicago on the eve of the Winter Solstice in 1931, a group of passengers tucked away in a Pullman car are challenged to come to terms with their own narrow perspective of the world and their place in it. With the American issue of racism as it's cornerstone, Wilder explores the hidebound notions we have inherited, and how the uses of power and identity can serve to separate us. As History and this moment in time speeds along, Wilder reveals the greater, invisible forces at work in all of our lives.

The Happy Journey To Trenton And Camden: A family of four travel in their 1924 Chevrolet from Newark, New Jersey to Camden. Along the way they must come to terms with the changing American landscape, the past, the present tensions within their dynamic filial relationships, and how to maintain a forward-looking industry and readiness in the face of everyday stress and crisis.

As with most of Thornton Wilder's work, each play calls upon the actors and the audience to engage in a collaboration of imagination. Wilder evokes great dreams in small places, and gives the theatrical experience full range in the realm of possibility. With each play Wilder touches without sentimentality upon his reoccurring themes of Life, Death, and Love, and how a young and changing America will work itself into the dawn of awareness, or fall to the forces of it's own individual, capital, and prejudicial needs.