Word: wilderness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Town (by Thornton W11der; produced by Jed Harris). Last week 40-year-old Novelist Thornton Wilder (The Bridge of San Luis Rey) achieved a 25-year-old ambition. He became a playwright in full Broadway standing. His play, moreover, proved him as adventurous in the theatre as he is cloistered at novel-writing. Concerned with life in a small New Hampshire community, Our Town is performed with nothing on the stage but a few tables, chairs and stepladders to indicate the town's geography. Partly imitating Chinese methods, Playwright Wilder has veteran Actor Frank Craven serve as property...
...plot of Our Town centres in a bashful boy-and-girl romance, but the general theme is more properly the chores and pleasures of Grover Corners as a whole. Without solemnity. Wilder seeks to transform the commonplaces of village life into the verities of human existence. Using fibred dialogue and lucid pantomime, for two acts he catches the fumbling wonderment of ordinary people, cakes their life with humor, charges it with feeling. The emotional climate is exactly right: warm...
...hand a mass of huddled wet umbrellas evoke a funeral. The dead girl comes to join the other dead. But she still yearns for the living. Permitted to return among them, she sees how blindly they grope through life, comes back to the cemetery eager to forget. Living people, Wilder seems to say, miss most of experience; only the dead get down to essences. But this moral needs no such circuitous statement, should not be interwoven with all the mysticism and high-flown speculation that Wilder insists on adding. A good playwright when he deals with living people...
...Town", presented by Jed Harris, written by Thornton Wilder, and starring Frank Craven, vitalizes the vital statistics of Grovers Corners, a mythical village in New Hampshire. Mr. Craven, called the Stage Manager, saunters about leisurely arranging and rearranging the few odd pieces of furniture serving as scenery, takes two parts in the play, apologizes for the coarseness of the characters' remarks, makes running comments to fill in the gaps in the action while leaning nonchalantly on one side of the portal of the stage and puffing, away at his pipe, thanks the actors for the episodes they have presented...
...jury of eight Wellesley undergraduates selected him as one of the ten finalists, he was then chosen by four Seniors, all engaged and therefore regarded as unprejudiced, and was crowned with a blue Wellesley ski cap by Gwendoline Wilder, president of the Wellesley Athletic Association...