Plays for Bleecker Street

Ben Shahn (1898-1969), the Lithuanian-born American artist, produced the production graphics for Plays for Bleecker Street. Known for his left-wing political views, his works of social realism and series of lectures published as The Shape of Content, in the 60's Shahn was also exploring illustration for theater and ballet set design. Just prior to his work for this production, he was at the Spoleto Festival (in September of ’61) designing the sets for a new Jerome Robbins ballet and an ee cummings play.

In 1951, when Theodore Mann and José Quintero founded Circle in the Square Theatre in a former nightclub on Sheridan Square, Greenwich Village was a flourishing arts scene. In particular, artists were captivated by the winding strip of Bleecker Street, even divided as it was by Robert Moses’s massive Title I housing project. Gian Carlo Menotti entitled his Pulitzer Prize-winning opera The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954) and following Wilder’s Plays for Bleecker Street (1959), Simon and Garfunkel used the name for one of the tracks on their debut album (1963).

So in 1959 when a 277-seat theater space became available at 159 Bleecker, Quintero and Mann leapt at the opportunity to produce plays at this coveted address. Their inaugural production was Wilder’s Our Town. “When José Quintero directed Our Town … Thornton fell in love with us” Mann told The New York Times years later. This production of Our Town had turned Wilder on to the intimacy of the Off-Broadway experience and more specifically the theatrical possibilities of the arena stage. “The unencumbered stage encourages truth in everyone,” he wrote in 1961. In fact, so strongly was his belief that for several years, Samuel French could only license these plays to companies agreeing to perform them on a thrust or arena stage. No doubt too, Wilder, a collector of characters and someone who thrived in artistic communities, and now deeply concerned with rising costs and related quality questions about drama on Broadway, fell  in love with the vibrant bohemia south of 14th Street. (Let us not forget, of course, that the 14th Street of the 1890s figures prominently and  musically boisterously in The Matchmaker.)

At the time of Circle in the Square’s production of Our Town, Wilder’s main writing focus was two series of one-act plays: The Seven Deadly Sins and The Seven Ages of Man.  He was fascinated by ability of the one-act to serve as a tour de force of dramatic theme and structure: playwriting in its purest form. He envisioned two series with fourteen plays in total. The first completed plays were from the Sins cycle, Bernice (Pride) and The Wreck on the Five Twenty-Five (Sloth) premiered in English at a special event in Berlin in 1957 (with Wilder himself performing in Pride). Despite their positive reception in West Germany, for reasons that have never been clear, Wilder withdrew them. That same year, in Zürich, a third Sin, The Drunken Sisters, which later become Gluttony in the Sin cycle, premiered as a satyr play for his full-length drama The Alcestiad. 

By the fall of 1961, three new one-acts were ready to be staged.  Perhaps keen to be back in lower Manhattan and working on that essential arena stage with producers he trusted, Wilder wrote to Mann to gauge his interest in producing these works: the Ages, Infancy and Childhood, and Someone from Assisi (Lust). 

Mann described to The Times, “they were all billed as Plays for Bleecker Street, which of course was where our theater was.”  Wilder’s title delighted Mann and Quintero. The triple bill opened on January 11, 1962, and ran for 349 performances.

For several years following, Wilder continued to work on his ambitious series of short plays, with Circle in the Square standing by to produce the entire fourteen. But Wilder never competed another piece of the two cycles to his taste.  The result?  At his death in 1975, the available  public record of his ambitious 14-play scheme contained a mere four works.

That record is far different today. In addition to  the two works birthed but withdrawn in Berlin, Thornton Wilder’s manuscripts housed in Yale’s Beinecke Library yielded up one completed Sin, Cement Hands (Avarice),  as well as five additional works (three Sins and two Ages) that were in good enough shape that they that could be fashioned into workable plays, a delicate job carried out by a informed student of  Thornton Wilder’s work who had the added benefit of having known the playwright well.  As a result, available for production, purchase and study today is a completed cycle of The Seven Deadly Sins and four of the seven Ages of Man— works now produced around the world.

What of the mutual adoration between Wilder and Circle in the Square?  That relationship came full circle. In April 1977 when the theater, in its current 650-seat location at Broadway and 50th Street, produced a special one-night-only celebration of Wilder’s life attended by friends, family and fans.  As The New York Times described the event: “Thornton Wilder, the playwright and novelist who died in 1975, came to life, theatrically speaking, (as he so successfully did), last night in a celebration of what would have been his 80th birthday.”