We’re launching a new holiday tradition—The Long Christmas Dinner Festival—and everyone is invited!

Stretching from Alaska to Florida, from California to Maine, and many places in between, the festival includes more than 35 theaters, schools, and bookstores in 22 states that will share Wilder’s holiday masterpiece, the one-act play The Long Christmas Dinner, with their communities. In just 40 minutes of stage time, the play shows 90 years of a family’s history flying by. This innovative, moving, funny, profound drama helps us understand time, tradition, and our own families more clearly. 

Some of the participating organizations will present full productions of the play; others will combine a reading of the play with a discussion of its themes. Many of the events will feature a mix of acclaimed actors and members of the community: a perfect occasion for gathering at holiday time.

This lineup contains some of the country’s most acclaimed theaters, all of whom have a recent history with Wilder’s plays (The Public Theater, The Goodman Theatre, Seattle Rep, Miami New Drama, Pasadena Playhouse, Rude Mechs) as well as high schools, independent bookstores, and colleges (including Vassar and Yale, where students collaborated to stage the play’s world premiere in 1931).

The Long Christmas Dinner

Before he penned Our Town, Thornton Wilder wrote this holiday masterpiece in which audiences, over 40 minutes, get to watch four generations of a family come and go, discovering which traditions endure, and leaving the theater seeing themselves and their own families more clearly. It was first produced November 25, 1931, not on Broadway but in a joint performance by the Yale Dramatic Association and the Vassar Philalethesis. The play, along with five of his other one-acts, was first published by Coward-McCann and Yale University Press as The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act. Most recently, it was published in November 2025 by HarperPerennial in the new collection of Wilder’s work, Our Town and the Cosmic One-Acts. Over the years, many artists have drawn inspiration from this little play with big ideas. Legendary director Tyrone Guthrie called it “the greatest play of our epoch.” Orson Welles admitted to drawing liberally from its premise to create the famous breakfast table scene in Citizen Kane, when the entire history of a marriage unfolds in clips over the same meal. In 1961, Wilder himself collaborated with composer Paul Hindemith to turn his play into an opera. Recent homages include The Long Christmas Ride Home by Paula Vogel, Dan LeFranc’s The Big Meal and Noah Haidle’s Birthday Candles.

The Long Christmas Dinner is presented by special arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of Samuel French, Inc.

The Educational Theatre Foundation is a proud partner of The Long Christmas Dinner Festival, working to bring this opportunity to high schools across the country.