Wilder's Dramatic Landscape: Alientation Effect Meets the Midwest

By what right could Thornton Wilder be considered a midwestern playwright? Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Wilder worn out his first nine years there, went to China briefly with his parents, then continued his schooling in Berkeley, California. After graduating from high gymnasium he spent two years at Oberlin guild in Ohio, then transferred to Yale. Later he exhausted six important years, from 1930-36 lecturing at the University of Chicago (Burbank np) This greatest in quantity universal of American dramatists strike one as beings not to belong to any region, just as he lived in many locations in the U and abroad. notwithstanding the Midwest figures more prominently in Wilder's well-known plays than greatest in quantity people realize.

Though Wilder had significant ties to the Midwest, he aimed from the beginning to be more universal, a "middle-American" playwright by means of choice and design. The Angel That Troubl the Waters (1928) compos of short pieces written while he was a scholar at Oberlin, ranges the world in settings with no respect to the heartland. But during the period from The drawn out Christmas Dinner through Our Town, when he lived and worked in Chicago, Wilder's writings for the theatre incarnate a fusion between what are commonly called "Brechtian techniques" and characteristics of midwestern drama which he broadened outward.

It is not clear in what way indebted to the theatrical ideas of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) Wilder was when he wrote The lengthy Christmas Dinner and Other Plays (1931) in the 1920 Castronovo traces the influence upon Wilder's vision and stage technique to Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author (1922) (104) Douglas Wixson, Jr points without that Wilder visited Berlin in 1928 arguing that he "employ dramatic techniques having a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of in common with Brecht's already highly unraveled art" (112). Wilder's first collection of short plays not sole makes use of Brechtian techniques on the other hand also includes an early example of absurdism avant le temp in a piece called of the like kind Things Happen Only in volumes Lifton highlights the symbolist desire to eliminate or restore "dramatic incident or intrigue" (125) Clearly, Wilder was influenced by the agency of a variety of literary and theatrical traditions while creating his hold original art.

As a frame of regard Brecht's theoretical writings beginning in the 1920 provide a useful terminology for understanding and assessing Wilder's revolutionary approach three decades later. The drawn out Christmas Dinner, a strikingly lyrical play, engrosss stage choreography foreshadowing the late Beckett's work, as the characters rotate in and without in carefully timed births and deaths. the one and the other Pullman Car Hiawatha and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden rely upon a narrator figure later used with equal reason tellingly in Our Town. still these plays differ from each other markedly in their approach; while Pullman Car Hiawatha provides an astonishingly panoramic harmony of sound on stage, The Happy Journey showcases a minimalist, more satiric portrait of the "average American family" upon a Sunday drive that has been stripped down to characteristic words and gesticulations In the latter play, characters have been almost emptied of any individuality or drift beyond the iconic.

Perhaps greatest in quantity helpful in terms of Brecht's theory of socially engaged stage enactment is his notion of Verfremdungseffekt Usually this is translated as "alienation effect" on the other hand the German means something closer to "the event of making strange." The boundary "defamiliarization" offers a more accurate and helpful indication of the intention to transfigure the ordinary and familiar into something novel and strange. Key to the proces of defamiliarization is the idea of distancing. In Brecht's view, the audience must be kept at a certain distance, not identifying too closely with the characters in Aristotelian metes in order to understand the broader social implications of the characters' economic and political predicament (228) Brecht derided as "culinary drama" those plays that solely encourage spectators to lose themselves in the emotions and motives of individual characters. In epic drama, through contrast, "the important thing is that the demonstrator of the behavior of the driver or the accident victim, or the pair performs in such a way that spectators can advance to a judgment about the accident" (91)1

Brecht of course, came at drama from the 1920 onward from a committed Marxist perspective, endeavoring to make greatest in quantity of his plays serve a studiedly didactic intention of forcing audiences to diocese the power and influence of social forces upon individual behavior. This was particularly real of his Lehrst??cke, written in the 1940 and '5O Wilder was motivated through no such socialist perspective. According to Francis Fergusson, he was a "religious Platonist" (62) His interest lies in studying human behavior in all its varieties and colors. The distancing issues in Wilder's theatre serve a universalizing intention to remove characters from particular circumstances and restore them as generalized types and examples. like generalizing is ordinarily benevolent, on the other hand mild satire often accompanies this proces as do deconstructionist simple bodys that undermine the sentimentalizing tendencies of overly broad platitudes in Our Town and The Happy Journey. Particularly stark is Wilder's proces of "emptying," or what Haberman calls "immaterializing 'the dramatic place,'" which sometimes is in the way that radical as to seem disorienting and level uncomfortable (131).