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Thornton Wilder Comedy 2m, 3f Simple Set In this provocative, sometimes chilling comedy, Wilder renders a child's-eye view of the grown-up world, as a father, a mother and their three children play a revealing game of make-believe in which the children pretend to be orphans. Startling truths emerge on both sides, as pretense challenges the family to discard the traditional roles of parent, spouse, child, and sibling--blurring the lines between perception and reality, artifice and innocence.
Childhood was first produced at the Circle in the Square Theater in New York January 10, 1962, as one of three plays grouped as "Plays for Bleecker Street." It was televised by the CBC in 1966 and 1969, and by an educational television channel in 1966 and 1970. "Admirers of Thornton Wilder's virtuouso short plays will be glad to hear he has returned to the form in which he excels."
-Irving Wardle, London Times, March 16, 1973 "We often hear the phrase, 'a winning child.' Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want."
-Thornton Wilder in The Paris Review Interviews, 1957
"I've been writing two plays (Ira and Childhood) that have dream sequences, and have become very attentive to what takes place in dreaming...In Childhood I use something I none too clearly remember from The Interpretation of Dreams (and by the light of that book, observed in my own dreaming): that an important person in one's dream, whom one's censor does not wish to identify or acknowledge, appears veiled or masked, or seen from the back only. So my children's father and mother." -Thornton Wilder, Journal, March 24, 1960 FEE: $45 per performance of single Wilder one act
$75 per performance of 3 Wilder one acts
$100 per performance of 4 or more Wilder one acts
Other Thornton Wilder titles available from Samuel French include:
The Alcestiad or A Life in the Sun The Beaux' Stratagem Bernice Cement Hands The Drunken Sisters The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden In Shakespeare and the Bible Infancy The Long Christmas Dinner Love and How To Cure It The Matchmaker Our Town Pullman Car Hiawatha Queens of France A Ringing of Doorbells Rivers Under the Earth The Skin of Our Teeth Someone from Assisi Such Things Only Happen in Books Theophilus North The Wreck on the 5:25 Youth
Collections
Collected Plays and Writings on Theater The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume I The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume II The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder Three Plays (Thornton Wilder) Thornton Wilder One Act Series: Wilder's Classic One Acts Thornton Wilder One Act Series: The Seven Deadly sins Thornton Wilder One Act Series: The Ages of Man
Novels
The Bridge of San Luis Rey The Cabala and The Woman of Andros: Two Novels The Eighth Day Heaven’s My Destination The Ides of March Theophilus North
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