Wilder’s Theatre Within Theatre. The Drama in a Dialogue with the Narrative

Abstract

In his theatre within theatre pieces (or rather plays within plays), Thornton Wilder put the drama into a dialogue with the narrative. In his plays Pullman Car Hiawatha (1931), Our Town (1938), and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) he introduced a Director in the role of a narrator to establish the dramatic action as a play within a play, and used this form to protect the autonomy of the playwright in relation to the other creators of the theatrical performance. In the process of its staging, the dramatic piece of art is always subject to change, even to digressions from the playwright’s intentions; and this is what Wilder was hoping to avoid. His solutions were not unlike those of his contemporary Bertolt Brecht: he was led to epic theatre by precisely the opposite tendency, the tendency to autonomize the stage and return theatre to theatre. By articulating with this form of a play within a play a way of expressing his own theatrical statement, Wilder stepped out of the traditional theatrical model of reception where a performance appears as an absolute, self-contained whole, separated from its audience, as well as from the playwright himself. He introduced to absolute drama events of epic proportions (with numerous sets, panoramic landscapes, ductile units of time and a host of people, most notably in The Skin of Our Teeth), without undoing its basic stipulations (tendencies towards succinctness, finality, and direct representation). At the same time, he also deconstructed or rather multiplied the basic dramatic categories (action, space, time, character) within the Aristotelian ideal of the dramatic unities and therefore turned a closed dramatic form into an open one. Wilder’s plays are an emblematic and possibly the most obvious example of the coexistence of absolute (closed form) drama and epic (open form) drama as the two opposite, ideally typical concepts of structuring dramatic material in the history of the theatre.