The Long Christmas Dinner

Before he penned Our Town, Thornton Wilder wrote a holiday masterpiece: the moving, funny, sometimes sorrowful, ingeniously theatrical one-act play, The Long Christmas Dinner.

In 40 minutes of stage time — in the course of a single unbroken holiday meal — 90 years of a family’s history fly by. We in the audience get to watch four generations come and go, discovering which traditions endure, and leave the theater seeing ourselves and our own families more clearly. As Wilder’s literary executor Jeremy McCarter wrote in a recent essay for The New York Times celebrating Our Town and the Cosmic One-Acts, a major new collection of Wilder’s work, it’s also “a play about time with a capital T,” and all the ways that time shapes our lives: “Imagine fish starting to grasp that there’s such a thing as water.”

The Long Christmas Dinner was first produced November 25, 1931 in a joint performance by the Yale Dramatic Association and the Vassar Philalethesis at the Yale University theater in New Haven, Connecticut, along with Love and How to Cure It, Such Things Only Happen in Books, and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden. 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 HarperCollins, in the latest collection of Wilder’s work entitled 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 memorable 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 Hindemuth 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 Haidel’s Birthday Candles.

The Long Christmas Dinner has been performed as a reading and conversation hosted by The Public Theater in New York City since 2013. This holiday tradition sees actors join fascinating artists, writers, and thinkers to read Wilder’s play together then talk about its themes: time, family, tradition, life, death. The lineup for the 2025 program, which was presented at Symphony Space, included great actors such as Jim Parsons, Renee Elise Goldsberry, and Becky Ann Baker, and great writers such as Chris Hayes, James Ijames, Sarah Ruhl, and Jacqueline Woodson.

IN THE NEWS

The One Act Play Your Family Should Read Together at Christmas - The New York Times. Illustration by María Jesús Contreras.