An Excerpt from THORNTON WILDER: A LIFE by Penelope Niven

Chapter 26 - “Chalk . . . Or Fire”

“Jed [Harris]  telephoned from London for 20 minutes the other night,” Wilder wrote to his mother and his sister Isabel on October 28, 1937 from Zurich. “He wants to know if ‘Our Town’ would be a good play for the Xmas season in New York. Would it?!! And guess who might act the lanky tooth picking Stage-manager? Sinclair Lewis! He’s been plaguing Jed to let him act for a long time.”  Harris, who badly needed another Broadway hit, had in turn been “plaguing” Wilder for a play. He had promised Harris years earlier to let him have the first look at his first full-length play, and Wilder was a man of his word . . .

By December 9 Wilder was back in the United States, where Harris had “installed, or rather imprisoned” him in a cottage in the “swankiest section” of Long Island, with a butler and a cook—and orders to finish Our Town. . . .. By the time Wilder arrived in New York, Harris was thinking of casting the actor Frank Craven to play Our Town’s Stage Manager, and was putting other production details in place, although he and Wilder had no written contract. Wilder was still finishing act 3, and rehearsals were about to begin in New York. He found himself in “such a mess of friendship-collaboration sentiment with Jed, and with the sense of guilt about the unfinished condition of the play” that he couldn’t bring himself to insist on a contract immediately.

Soon the play was cast, and the script was finished, with some revisions by Harris—“admirable alterations in the order of the scenes, and some deletions that I would have arrived at anyway,” Wilder wrote, plus “a number of tasteless little jokes” that “don’t do much harm,” although they gave Harris “that sensation of having written the play which is so important to him.” . . .

Wilder quickly learned that in Jed Harris he had to confront a nearly invincible adversary. Constitutionally averse to conflict, Wilder fought for the integrity of his script but internalized much of his anger and frustration. By mid-January he told Harris he had a “whole set of Nature’s Warnings = twitches, and stutterings and head aches.” He was going to have to “retire” from the production for a while, to sleep and rest and regain his “fresh eye” for the play. His perspective, he said, had “become so jaundiced that I can no longer catch what’s good or bad.”

At noon on January 22, 1938—before the opening of the Princeton tryout that evening—a deeply worried Wilder recorded his concerns about Harris’s production and sealed them in an envelope that was not opened until 1944, when Isabel Wilder took out her brother’s notes and read them at the time of Our Town’s first revival in New York. That snowy day in Princeton in 1938 Wilder wrote that he was very much afraid certain of Harris’s production elements would “harm and perhaps shipwreck” the play’s effectiveness. He feared that the play was “in danger of falling into trivial episodes,” that Harris had not “vigorously directed” some of his actors, that he had an “astonishingly weak sense of visual reconstruction,” that his interpolations in the text robbed it of “its nervous compression.” . . .

Together, through their contentious collaboration, Thornton Wilder and Jed Harris, the idealistic Broadway neophyte and the hardened Broadway veteran, brought Our Town to vivid life on Broadway, first at the Henry Miller’s Theatre, and then at the Morosco, where it would run more than ten months, closing November 19, 1938, after 336 performances.

Penelope Niven was the critically acclaimed author of Carl Sandburg: A Biography, Steichen: A Biography, and, most recently, Thornton Wilder: A Life. She and actor James Earl Jones co-authored Voices and Silences, praised as a classic on acting, and she also penned a memoir, Swimming Lessons. Carl Sandburg: Adventures of a Poet, her biography for children, was awarded an International Reading Association Prize "for exceptionally distinguished literature for children," one of six books honored among publications from 99 countries. http://www.penelopeniven.org/