(Much shifting of gears, backing, and jolting.)
MA: Yes, there it is. Camden—five miles. Dear old Beulah. —Now, children, you be good and quiet during dinner. She’s just got out of bed after a big sorta operation, and we must all move around kinda quiet. First you drop me and Caroline at the door and just say hello, and then you menfolk go over to the Y.M.C.A. and come back for dinner in about an hour.
CAROLINE (Shutting her eyes and pressing her fists passionately against her nose): I see the first star. Everybody make a wish.
Star light, star bright,
First star I seen tonight.
I wish I may, I wish I might
Have the wish I wish tonight.
(Then solemnly) Pins. Mama, you say “needles.” (She interlocks little fingers with her mother)
MA: Needles.
CAROLINE: Shakespeare. Ma, you say “Longfellow.”
MA: Longfellow.
CAROLINE: Now it’s a secret and I can’t tell it to anybody. Ma, you make a wish.
MA (With almost grim humor): No, I can make wishes without waiting for no star. And I can tell my wishes right out loud too. Do you want to hear them?
CAROLINE (Resignedly): No, Ma, we know ’em already. We’ve heard ’em. (She hangs her head affectedly on her mother’s left shoulder and says with unmalicious mimicry) You want me to be a good girl and you want Arthur to be honest in word and deed.
MA (Majestically): Yes. So mind yourself.
ELMER: Caroline, take out that letter from Beulah in my coat pocket by you and read aloud the places I marked with red pencil.
CAROLINE (Working): “A few blocks after you pass the two big oil tanks on your left . . .”
EVERYBODY (Pointing backward): There they are!
CAROLINE: “. . . you come to a corner where there’s an A & P store on the left and a firehouse kitty-corner to it . . .”
(They all jubilantly identify these landmarks.)
“. . . turn right, go two blocks, and our house is Weyerhauser Street Number 471.”
MA: It’s an even nicer street than they used to live in. And right handy to an A & P.
CAROLINE (Whispering): Ma, it’s better than our street. It’s richer than our street. —Ma, isn’t Beulah richer than we are?
MA (Looking at her with a firm and glassy eye): Mind yourself, missy. I don’t want to hear anybody talking about rich or not rich when I’m around. If people aren’t nice I don’t care how rich they are. I live in the best street in the world because my husband and children live there.
(She glares impressively at Caroline a moment to let this lesson sink in, then looks up, sees Beulah and waves.)
There’s Beulah standing on the steps lookin’ for us.
(Beulah has appeared and is waving.
They all call out: “Hello, Beulah—Hello.”
Presently they are all getting out of the car.)
BEULAH: Hello, Mama.—Well, lookit how Arthur and Caroline are growing!
MA: They’re bursting all their clothes!
BEULAH (Kisses her father long and affectionately): Hello, Papa. Good old Papa. You look tired, Pa—
MA: —Yes, your pa needs a rest. Thank Heaven, his vacation has come just now. We’ll feed him up and let him sleep late. Pa has a present for you, Loolie. He would go and buy it.
BEULAH: Why, Pa, you’re terrible to go and buy anything for me. Isn’t he terrible?
MA: Well, it’s a secret. You can open it at dinner.
BEULAH (Puts her arm around his neck and rubs her nose against his temple): Crazy old Pa, goin’ buyin’ things! It’s me that ought to be buyin’ things for you, Pa.
ELMER: Oh, no! There’s only one Loolie in the world.
BEULAH (Whispering, as her eyes fill with tears): Are you glad I’m still alive, Pa?
(She kisses him abruptly and goes back to the house steps.)
ELMER: Where’s Horace, Loolie?
BEULAH: He was kep’ over a little at the office. He’ll be here any minute. He’s crazy to see you all.
MA: All right. You men go over to the Y and come back in about an hour.
BEULAH (As her father returns to the wheel, she stands out in the street beside him): Go straight along, Pa, you can’t miss it. It just stares at ya.
(The Stage Manager removes the automobile with the help of Elmer and Arthur, who go off waving their good-byes.)
Well, come on upstairs, Ma, and take off your things.
Caroline, there’s a surprise for you in the backyard.
CAROLINE: Rabbits?
BEULAH: No.
CAROLINE: Chickens?
BEULAH: No. Go and see.
(Caroline runs offstage.
Beulah and Ma gradually go upstairs.)
There are two new puppies. You be thinking over whether you can keep one in Newark.
MA: I guess we can. It’s a nice house, Beulah. You just got a lovely home.
BEULAH: When I got back from the hospital, Horace had moved everything into it, and there wasn’t anything for me to do.
MA: It’s lovely.
(The Stage Manager pushes out a bed from the left. Its foot is toward the right. Beulah sits on it, testing the springs.)
BEULAH: I think you’ll find this comfortable, Ma.
MA (Taking off her hat): Oh, I could sleep on a heapa shoes, Loolie! I don’t have no trouble sleepin’. (She sits down beside her) Now let me look at my girl. Well, well, when I last saw you, you didn’t know me. You kep’ saying: “When’s Mama comin’? When’s Mama comin’?” But the doctor sent me away.
BEULAH (Puts her head on her mother’s shoulder and weeps): It was awful, Mama. It was awful. She didn’t even live a few minutes, Mama. It was awful.
MA (Looking far away): God thought best, dear. God thought best. We don’t understand why. We just go on, honey, doin’ our business. (Then almost abruptly—passing the back of her hand across her cheek) Well, now, what are we giving the men to eat tonight?
BEULAH: There’s a chicken in the oven.
MA: What time didya put it in?
BEULAH (Restraining her): Aw, Ma, don’t go yet. I like to sit here with you this way. You always get the fidgets when we try and pet ya, Mama.
MA (Ruefully, laughing): Yes, it’s kinda foolish. I’m just an old Newark bag-a-bones. (She glances at the backs of her hands)
BEULAH (Indignantly): Why, Ma, you’re good-lookin’! We always said you were good-lookin’.—And besides, you’re the best ma we could ever have.
MA (Uncomfortable): Well, I hope you like me. There’s nothin’ like being liked by your family. —Now I’m going downstairs to look at the chicken. You stretch out here for a minute and shut your eyes. —Have you got everything laid in for breakfast before the shops close?
BEULAH: Oh, you know! Ham and eggs.
(They both laugh.)
MA: I declare I never could understand what men see in ham and eggs. I think they’re horrible. —What time did you put the chicken in?
BEULAH: Five o’clock.
MA: Well, now, you shut your eyes for ten minutes.
(Beulah stretches out and shuts her eyes.
Ma descends the stairs absentmindedly singing:)
There were ninety and nine that safely lay
In the shelter of the fold,
But one was out on the hills away,
Far off from the gates of gold . . .
END OF PLAY
PART II
Plays for Bleecker Street
(PLAYS IN ONE ACT FOR AN ARENA STAGE)
IN 1956, Thornton Wilder began a series of short plays for the arena stage that grew into an ambitious attempt to write two cycles of plays depicting “The Seven Deadly Sins” and “The Seven Ages of Man.” In his lifetime, Wilder completed and released six of the projected fourteen plays—Childhood, Infancy, Someone from Assisi (Lust), The Drunken Sisters (Gluttony), Bernice (Pride) and The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five (Sloth)—but withdrew the latter two after a single performance of each in Berlin in 1957.
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This section includes these six plays as well as five additional plays that appear here in print for the first time. These are works that Wilder never completed, but left in various drafts as part of his archive. F. J. O’Neil, an actor and director, who knew Wilder, is responsible for the research and editing of A Ringing of Doorbells (Envy), In Shakespeare and the Bible (Wrath), The Rivers Under the Earth (probably middle age) and Youth. The fifth play, Cement Hands (Avarice), makes its debut thanks to Donald Gallup, Thornton Wilder’s former literary executor. With the exception of a single public reading of Cement Hands, these five plays have never been performed.
The name “Plays for Bleecker Street: Plays in One-Act for an Arena Stage” refers to the title given Infancy, Childhood and Someone from Assisi, which premiered in 1962 at Circle in the Square in New York. It seems more than appropriate to identify this first published collection of Wilder’s last works as a dramatist (eleven plays is all we shall have, though he had hoped to premiere all fourteen) with the title given by the theatre that in part inspired his work on the “Sins” and “Ages” cycles.
“The Seven Deadly Sins” plays are presented in an order Wilder described in his journals in 1959 rather than in strict canonical order.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
by Donald Gallup
This note previously appeared in a slightly different form in the Yale Review in October 1994.
AT SARATOGA SPRINGS in 1956, Thornton Wilder began a series of “Four-Minute Plays for Four Persons,” in continuation of his “Three-Minute Plays for Three Persons,” most of which were written during his undergraduate days at Oberlin and Yale. (The best were published in 1928 as The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays.) As he commented in his journal on 2 December 1956, “The self-imposition of a scheme [is] always seen as an aid, even when as with Joyce one sees it becoming an appalling exacting discipline.”
The Drunken Sisters (published in the Atlantic Monthly in November 1957, and eventually as the satyr play to conclude The Alcestiad) and In Shakespeare and the Bible (never completed to the author’s satisfaction) may have been the first of the new series to be written, both soon developing beyond the four-minute limit, though still “shorter than one-act plays should be for practical purposes.” The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five was begun at 5:00 A.M. on 17 November, and Bernice in the afternoon of the 23rd. As Thornton Wilder worked on these plays, he considered possible subjects for addition to the series. Surveying what he had written, he observed in his journal on 13 December 1956:
What I particularly like about all these, including the manqué ones, is the completeness of their expression as plays for a theatre in the round. This quality is at its best in The Wreck, precisely because it is about “looking through windows”; but in each of the later ones I seem to acquire—without that adventitious aid—a deeper exploration of the mode. Now I want to make some more—and, oh, Muse, I want one or two in lighter vein to go with these horrors.
At St. Moritz, on 14 June 1957, Thornton Wilder began The Rivers Under the Earth. In his journal he wrote:
. . . what was clearest was the felicity for the arena stage of this nocturnal scene by Lake Geneva, fireflies, bonfires, and the “rocks” dispersed about the scene . . . I hope this comes out all right. It seems to me now to be the promise of a beautiful and hushed and intimative play.
Five days later, he reported:
Well, I’ve about finished . . . This play presents an enormous difficulty: it must be, by its very nature, two-thirds exposition. I have to plant all those “buried associations” which, like time-bombs, explode in rapid succession in the closing third . . .
Later in 1957, when the American National Theatre and Academy asked to include his work in a program of American plays for the dedication of the new Congress Hall in West Berlin (built for cultural and scientific meetings by the Benjamin Franklin Foundation), Thornton Wilder offered The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five and Bernice from the new series, along with The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden (first published in 1931). Seven one-act plays were presented, in English, with Thornton Wilder as master of ceremonies, on 20 September 1957, before an audience of twelve hundred. There were two by Tennessee Williams: This Property Is Condemned and Portrait of a Madonna, the latter with Lillian Gish (for whom the play was written). Then came Eugene O’Neill’s Before Breakfast, with Eileen Heckart and James Daly, and William Saroyan’s monologue Ever Been in Love with a Midget? The three plays by Wilder ended the evening: first Bernice, with Ethel Waters and the author himself; then The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five, with Lillian Gish and Hiram Sherman; and finally The Happy Journey, with the author as the Stage Manager and Ethel Waters as Ma Kirby.
According to the Times (London) of 23 September 1957, The Wreck was “far and away the best” of the Wilder plays:
Suburban frustration and lack of communication are familiar enough themes, but Mr. Wilder handles them with a subtle eye and brings his symbols and universal into the drawing-room without falsification on either level, a feat which is made to seem less remarkable than it is by the skill with which it is done.
The Times’s critic dismissed Bernice as “cliché”—and went on to deplore as “the only lapse” in the program a “treacly religious ditty [“His Eye Is on the Sparrow”] imposed on the last piece [The Happy Journey] by Miss Ethel Waters.” (Ethel Waters had sung the hymn to great acclaim during the Broadway run of Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding. She complained that there was no God in Bernice.)
But the general reception of both the new plays (“applauded as theatre but deprecated as life,” according to the New York Times) was disappointing to Thornton Wilder. Although he did permit a German translation of Bernice to appear three years later in Die Neue Rundschau, he refused to allow any other publication or production of either play.
On board the SS Vulcania on his way to Europe in November 1958, Thornton Wilder resumed intensive work on the one-act plays. He had already begun a seventh for the series, a comic play dealing with avarice (originally called The Cabots and eventually Cement Hands) when he read in Jean Paris’s book on James Joyce the suggestion that four of the stories in Dubliners exemplify four of the Seven Deadly Sins in the canonical order. As he reported in his journal on 24 November:
. . . it suddenly swept over me that maybe all my seven could be les péchés capitaux. And in a few minutes I saw that I could save and finish and deepen those two plays which I thought were to be discarded [The Ringing of Doorbells and In Shakespeare and the Bible], and that the three I had written could very well fit into such a series . . .
Bernice [Pride] would require the addition of only a few lines: that the “born alone” of these two was to be born disdainful of others, superior, secret, and prideful. The Ringing of Doorbells [Envy] now comes to life and meaning and will be very strong (though . . . I do not see its concluding moments). As I groped in the extremely difficult problem of “exemplifying” . . . [Lust], there came back to my mind that notion I had long had of doing a St. Francis before the conversion: that saints are monsters of nature that have hesitated, been good and evil at their extremes. This [Someone from Assisi] promises to be a most extraordinary play, indeed, and full of matter not often said. I do not yet see how In Shakespeare and the Bible can be directed towards a statement about . . . [Wrath]; I may have to find another story, but such lies latent there: that wrath against a person is wrath against the universe; that—as I say so often of the Irish—they are grandiose before they find the pretext for the quarrel. The Drunken Sisters [Gluttony] acquires a new charm when we see it in this framework. The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five [Sloth] will require the addition of a few words to show that the type of despair into which the hero falls is, precisely, in Dante’s sense, an unwillingness to accept the gifts of life: “Sullen we were in the bright air.” [The quotation is from the Inferno, canto 7, lines 121–24 (Circle V, Of the Wrathful and the Sullen). Thornton Wilder’s Dante, in the Temple Classics edition, h
as the Italian text underlined by him and gives this English equivalent: “Fixed in the slime, they say: ‘Sullen were we / in the sweet air, that is gladdened by the Sun, / carrying lazy smoke within our hearts; / / now lie we sullen here in the black mire.’“]
In Salzburg two weeks later he expressed his satisfaction:
How right I was to hit on this serial idea. The plays become gonflé with the concept and the author is relieved of the necessity of underscoring it.
The difficulty of Someone from Assisi is to carry the burden of two tremendous elements as subordinate to elements that must overweigh them, i.e., brief summarized sketches of the characteristics of a St. Francis and a St. Clara as merely contributive to the idea of the Erotic as Destroyer and the Erotic as Creative.
By the spring of 1959 the order and titles for “The Seven Deadly Sins” series had been firmly established:
“SEVEN PLAYS IN ONE ACT FOR AN ARENA STAGE”: “The Seven Deadly Sins”
The Drunken Sisters (Gluttony)
Bernice (Pride)
The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five (Sloth)
A Ringing of Doorbells (Envy)
In Shakespeare and the Bible (Wrath)
Someone from Assisi (Lust)
Cement Hands (Avarice)
In this period Thornton Wilder had begun to go to the Circle in the Square in New York, and was impressed with the skill demonstrated by José Quintero, the director, in using this surrounded platform. Because he had always intended his one-act plays for the arena stage, he had agreed, in May 1959, that the Circle in the Square could present them. He hoped they would begin “in the fall” if he could “write finis” to them.
But a year later, in May 1960, “The Seven Deadly Sins” plays were still not complete; an entirely new series—“The Seven Ages of Man”—had been added; and, as his journal entry for 16 May shows, further new ideas were being contemplated:
I would like this series of Seven Ages plays to be also a repertory of different kinds of plays. Could I do this “Youth” as a Noh, or as a commedia dell’arte, or as a Raimund Volksstuck, and so on? Of course, this Youth-confronting-Age could take its place toward the end of the series, too.