Short Play
Dramatic Comedy
Christmas/Holiday
40 minutes
Time Period - 1930s, 1920s, 1910s / WWI, 1900-1910, 19th Century
Settings Of Play - The dinning room table in the Bayard home, over the course of nine decades.
FEATURES / CONTAINS
Local Celebrity Cameo, No intermission
Interior Set, Bare Stage/Simple Set
Period Costumes
CAUTIONS
No Special Cautions
THEMES
Adolescence, Aging, Business, Childhood, Christianity, Death, Illness/Health, Love, Marriage, Memory, Parenting/Family, Religion
TARGET AUDIENCE
Appropriate for all audiences, Adult, Senior, Children (Age 6 - 10), Pre-Teen (Age 11 - 13), Teen (Age 14 - 18)
PERFORMANCE GROUP
High School/Secondary, College Theatre / Student, Community Theatre, Dinner Theatre, Professional Theatre, Senior Theatre, Reader's Theatre, Shoestring Budget, Blackbox / Second Stage /Fringe Groups, Church / Religious Groups
RECOGNITION / AWARDS
From Off-Broadway
The Long Christmas Dinner - nine decades long - showcases the
lives of several generations of the Bayard family, and some of their
Christmas dinners. Wilder breaks the boundaries of time as we measure
it, and invites us to partake of "one long, happy Christmas
dinner"-past, present and future. As generations appear, have children,
wither and depart, only the audience appreciates what changes and what
remains the same. "Every last twig is wrapped around with ice. You
almost never see that," young Genevieve marvels, not realizing that her
mother has made this observation years earlier nor that her
daughter-in-law will one day do the same.
"Like a surprise holiday gift...[these plays] shine like gems." - The New York Times
"Of all my plays it is the one that has found the widest variety of receptions. At some performances it has been played to constant laughter; some listeners are deeply moved and shaken by it; some find it cruel and cynical (What? The dead are forgotten so soon?)" - Thornton Wilder in a letter written April 11, 1960 to Gertrude Hindemith, whose husband, the composer Paul Hindemith, wrote an opera based on the play
The Long Christmas Dinner was first produced November 25, 1931 in a joint performance by the Yale Dramatic Association and the Vassar Philaletheis at the Yale University theater in New Haven, Connecticut, along with Love and How to Cure It, Such Things Only Happen in Books, and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden.
