Wilder’s Letter to Alexander Woollcott About Considering Playing the Stage Manager - July 1938

Alexander Woollcott was an American drama critic for The New Yorker, a member of the Algonquin Round Table, an occasional actor and playwright, as well as a prominent radio personality. Wilder and Woollcott were great friends with an extraordinary correspondence in which Wilder seems completely himself. In fact, a decade before Woollcott died in 1943, Wilder wrote to thank him for “loyally listening to my character and not my words.” Wilder wrote this letter in 1938 when he was considering playing the Stage Manager in Our Town for a few weeks on Broadway.

Texas in a small way

<early July (?) 1938>

Dear Aleck:

You shall be the first to know.

I’m entering into a very tender union and both of us think that

Wilder (right) with Alexander Woollcott (center) and Max Beerbohm in the 1940s.

you should be the first to know.

I’m going on the stage.

I’m replacing Frank Craven for 2 weeks.

That is to say: I’m memorizing the lines. I’m insisting on two days’

rehearsal with the stage-manager before Jed sees me. (You can imagine

how even the most shy and considerate suggestion from Jed would dry

up my hypothetical art).

[Besides I have a far better and more experienced and con-

genial coach in Dr. Otto Ludwig Preminger of Vienna’s Josefstadt

who is waiting at the Ambassador Hotel to encourage & guide me. —

Confidential]

I’m going to make Jed pay me 300 a weeks which I shall give to the

Actors Fund.

Of course, maybe I can’t and won’t do it.* But there’s a chance that

I can transfer the best of the lecturing experience and the result might

be a pleasure to me and to them.

The memory hazards are immense.

__________

Anyway: what’s life it is isn’t risk, venture, taxes on the will-power, diversity and fun?

My only real fear is that I may make the play spineless and boring

and Dr. Preminger — honest as the day — will tell me, if I do.

== I leave The Merchant of Yonkers during its casting week. And

I dote on you

Thornton

*Wilder did play the Stage Manager in Our Town in New York for two weeks in September 1938.