"[Our Town] leaves us with a sense of blessing, and the unspoken but palpable command to achieve gratitude in what remains of our days on earth." -- The New Yorker Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of life in the mythical village of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire--an allegorical representation of all life--is an American classic. It is the simple story of a love affair that asks timeless questions about the meaning of love, life, and death. Our Town explores the relationship between two young neighbors, George Gibbs and Emily Webb, whose childhood friendship blossoms into romance, and then culminates in marriage. When Emily loses her life during childbirth, the circle of life portrayed in each of the three acts--childhood, adulthood, and death--is fully realized. Widely considered one of the greatest American plays of all time, Our Town debuted on Broadway in 1938 and continues to be performed daily on stages around the world. This special edition includes an afterword by Wilder's nephew, Tappan Wilder, with illuminating documentary material about the playwright and his most famous drama.

Finding the theatre of the 1920s lacking in bite and conviction, Thornton Wilder set out to bring back realism and to celebrate the innocent, simple and religious. Yet he also tried to endow individual experience with cosmic significance and Our Town is both an affectionate portrait of American life and 'an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life'. The Skin of our Teeth deals with human survival in a 'comic strip' way, and The Matchmaker is a hilarious farce which urges rebellion against all the constraints that deny a rich, full life.

Winner 1938 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
In an important publishing event, Samuel French, in cooperation with the Thornton Wilder estate is pleased to release the playwright's definitive version of "Our Town." This edition of the play differs only slightly from previous acting editions, yet it presents "Our Town" as Thornton Wilder wished it to be performed. Described by Edward Albee as ..".the greatest American play ever written," the story follows the small town of Grover's Corners through three acts: "Daily Life," "Love and Marriage," and "Death and Eternity." Narrated by a stage manager and performed with minimal props and sets, audiences follow the Webb and Gibbs families as their children fall in love, marry, and eventually-in one of the most famous scenes in American theatre-die. Thornton Wilder's final word on how he wanted his play performed is an invaluable addition to the American stage and to the libraries of theatre lovers internationally.

Characters: 4 or 5 male, 4 or 5 female, plus many small parts w/doubling

Scenery: Interiors and Exteriors

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this is the groundbreaking satiric fantasy follows the extraordinary Antrobus family down through the ages from the time of "The War" surviving flood, fire, pestilence, locusts, the ice age, the pox and the double feature, a dozen subsequent wars and as many depressions. Ultimately, they are the stuff of which heroes and buffoons are made. Their survival is a vividly theatrical testament of faith in humanity.

"Wonderfully wise...A tremendously exciting and profound stage fable."-Herald Tribune

In New Orleans in 1869, M'su Cahusac, a charlatan of a lawyer, preys on vulnerable women, convincing each one that she is a legitimate descendant of the long-lost Dauphin, who fled Paris for New Orleans at the age of 10 during the French Revolution. Therefore, he tells each victim, she is the rightful Queen of France. Tantalized by visions of wealth, palaces and power, each victim responds in her own fashion to this preposterous revelation, which the lawyer claims is supported by the Historical Society of Paris.

Welcome to a new collection of Thornton Wilder's last plays - a series of one-acts that were part of his extravagantly ambitious project to creat two one-act play cycles based on the Deadly Sins and the Ages of Man. Published for the first time in a single acting edition, Wilder's Ages of Man presents his series of stirring short works that capture four important stages of life.
Contents:
"Infancy"
"Childhood"
"Youth"
"The Rivers Under the Earth "

When the bridge over a gorge in Peru breaks, five people are plunged to their deaths. Brother Juniper, a witness, wishing to explain the ways of God to his fellow man, examines the lives of these five, believing that this will lead him to find a reason for the fatal accident. The questions he raises concern life and death; chance and God; faith and unbelief. Whatever answers are to be found contain an affirmation, if not of God, then of the powers of love.

In this play about the Deadly Sin of Lust, Saint Francis, almost blind and toothless and nearing the end of his life, revisits Assisi, where he encounters Pica, a young girl with the same name as his mother; Mother Clara of Saint Damian's Convent; and Mona Lucrezia (now a mad woman) with whom he had a love affair when he was a wild, willful young man known as Francis the Frenchman, and she was a young married woman. Saint Francis still seeks expiation for the "load of sin" with which he has offended God. The play poses questions about the true meaning of love-and, as Wilder wrote, about "the ideas of the Erotic as Destroyer and the Erotic as Creative."

A father, mother and two of their three surviving children drive from Newark, New Jersey to Camden to visit their married daughter, who has recently lost her baby in childbirth. Their journey is punctuated by talk, laughter, memories (some mundane, some happy, some painful), and appreciation of the Now - ham and eggs, flowers, family, sunsets and the joy of being alive. In this family drama, nothing much happens-and yet everything important happens. As Ma Kirby says, "There's nothin' like bein' liked by your family."

An adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's most notable play about a waning marriage, and the social constructs between a husband and wife. Thornton Wilder's acting version of A Doll's House premiered on Broadway at the Morsco Theatre in December 1937, under the direction of Jed Harris.

Set in the tony resort town of Newport, RI, during the height of the Jazz Age in summer, 1926, Theophilus North follows the exploits of the title character as he searches for adventure and his place in the world. Quitting his teaching position in New Jersey, and stranded in Newport after his jalopy breaks down, thirty-year-old Theophilus takes odd jobs (tennis instructor, French tutor, private reader...) in houses of the wealthy, infiltrating himself into the lives and troubles of Newport

'Our Town' was first produced and published in 1938 to wide acclaim. This Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of life in the small village of Grover's Corners, an allegorical representation of all life, has become a classic. It is Thornton Wilder's most renowned and most frequently performed play.

To his horror, the middle-aged Captain Gulliver finds himself marooned, dying of hunger and thirst in "The Country of The Young"--a world of youth so mistrustful of age that anyone approaching thirty is ritually dispatched. Here, he encounters an ersatz aristocracy and servant class who are both appalled by and attracted to what they see in him. By virtue of age alone, he represents everything they hate--the old men immortalized in their books who have sent younger men off to war; old men who frustrate and thwart the young in order to keep themselves in power. Yet he appeals to their latent humanity and their need to do something other than just play at childish games. Through his cunning and wisdom, Gulliver manages to gain the trust of one of his female captors and enlist the help of a talented servant-class carpenter. Together they make a narrow escape, the two young islanders looking forward to the promise of a new world in which people may someday see their children grow into manhood and womanhood and hold their grandchildren on their knees. Conceived in the 1960s, amid a youthful population who had discovered for the first time its social and political clout, "Youth" might well have been Wilder's satirical meditation on the excesses of America. More than just a jab at a particular decade and the foibles of utopian idealism of young people everywhere, however, "Youth" demonstrates Wilder's ever-generous spirit, his life-long belief in community and the value of the contributions every individual can make.

Walbeck, a thoroughly hated man who cheated hundreds of people out of their money, suddenly returns home from Joliet prison when his sentence is reduced. He is greeted by two people: his attorney, who informs him that Walbeck's wife has fled to California, taking his daughter with her, and a new maid, Bernice, the self-proclaimed "best cook in Chicago" recently hired to keep the home going. Bernice, it turns out, served time for murder, and the advice she gives Walbeck on how to deal with his future allows Wilder to explore the nature of pride. Decisions have to be made quickly when Walbeck learns that his daughter is still in Chicago and coming by to see him at any moment.

Thornton Wilder referred to The Alcestiad as "a mixture of religious revival, mother-love-dynamite, and heroic daring-do." In it, he retells the ancient legend of Alcestis, Queen of Thessaly, who gave her life for her husband Admetus, beloved of Apollo, and was brought back from Hell by Hercules. When the brave and confused Alcestis returns from the dead, asking large questions about what matters most in life and how we lead it, we catch more than a glimpse of Emily in Act III of Our T

Welcome to a new collection of Thornton Wilder's last plays - a series of one acts that were part of his extravagantly ambitious project to creat two one act play cycles based on the Deadly Sins and the Ages of Man. Published for the first time in a single acting edition, Wilder's The Seven Deadly Sins presents a series of short works depicting the complexity and consequences of human frailty.
Contents:
"The Drunken Sisters "(Gluttony)
"Bernice" (Pride)
"The Wreck on the 5:25 "(Sloth)
"A Ringing of Doorbells "(Envy)
"In Shakespeare and the Bible "(Wrath)
"Someone From Assisi" (Lust)
"Cement Hands "(Avarice)