Though written over a decade ago, Emilio DeGrazia’s talk struck me on two levels. The first is what it suggests about how we study drama but the other is how alike Wilder is to Arthur Miller in terms of their techniques and ambitions. How DeGrazia describes the way in which he eventually came to Wilder raises several ongoing concerns regarding the study of drama, which often feels like it is treated as the overlooked stepchild in the panoply of literature, despite its predating fiction by centuries. Few plays outside of Shakespeare are treated as truly “canonical” as they are usually given short shrift in most “Introduction to Literature” courses, despite their inherent teachability. Scholars in other fields (focusing on fiction, poetry, etc.) can overlook the complexity of how scholars discuss plays, as we need not only consider the written text, but also the performative aspects that include not only the...
Responses to DeGrazia Available to Purchase
SUSAN C. W. ABBOTSON is professor of English at Rhode Island College specializing in modern and contemporary drama. Aside from several books on Arthur Miller and drama in general, she has published essays on Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Tom Stoppard, Mae West, Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder, August Wilson, Eugene O’Neill, Lillian Hellman, Ivo van Hove, and Paula Vogel in a variety of books and journals.
CHRISTOPHER BENFEY is the author of five books about the American Gilded Age, including, most recently, If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years (2019). The Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English Emeritus at Mount Holyoke College, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and Raritan.
MICHAEL Y. BENNETT is an associate professor of English and affiliated faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. In addition to being a past Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he is a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, where he was a Visiting Fellow. In addition to being on the Advisory Boards of Comparative Drama and the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, he is the president of The Edward Albee Society, the editor of the book series Routledge Studies on Edward Albee and American Theatre, and is the editor of the journal Theatre and Performance Notes and Counternotes. A theater theorist and critic known for his work on absurd drama, philosophy of theater, Edward Albee, and Oscar Wilde, he is the author or editor of fifteen books.
HANSONG DAN is professor of English at Nanjing University. His research interests include modern and contemporary American literature, critical theory, transmediality, and digital humanities. He is the author of To Realize the Universal: Allegorical Narrative in Thornton Wilder’s Plays and Novels (2012) and the translator of works by Thomas Pynchon, Julian Barnes, and Thornton Wilder. He co-edited a special issue of Comparative Literature Studies on global crises and world literature. In 2022, he published Transcending Ground Zero: A Study on Twenty-First-Century American Fiction
GEORGE DRANCE has performed and directed in over twenty-five countries on five continents. He is the Artistic Director of the critically acclaimed Magis Theatre Company, a member of La MaMa ETC’s Great Jones Rep, an Artist-in Residence at Fordham University Lincoln Center, and a pastoral associate at St. Malachy’s (The Actor’s Chapel) in New York City.
THIERRY DUBOST is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Caen Normandie, France. He is the author of Struggle, Defeat or Rebirth: Eugene O’Neill’s Vision of Humanity (2005), The Plays of Thomas Kilroy (2007), and Eugene O’Neill and the Reinvention of Theatre Aesthetics (2019). He was awarded the Eugene O’Neill Society Medallion in 2022. He has co-edited eight books, which mainly focus on modern or contemporary Irish and American drama. He has translated into French Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and Thomas Kilroy’s The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde. He is currently working on food in contemporary American plays.
WILLIAM GRANGE is Professor Emeritus of Theatre and Film at the University of Nebraska. He is the author of thirteen books, along with dozens of essays, articles, reviews, and book chapters in scholarly journals. He has received two Fulbright Senior Scholar grants, the Mellon Prize from the University of Texas, five senior fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Encore Prize from the Actors’ Fund of the United States for his contributions to the American acting profession.
DAVID GREENSPAN has appeared in his own plays, including his adaptation of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, performed solo renditions of dramatic and nondramatic texts, and acted in the work of contemporary playwrights; his honors include six OBIEs.
STUART J. HECHT is associate professor of Theatre at Boston College and the long-standing editor of New England Theatre Journal. In addition to publishing many scholarly articles and book chapters, Hecht authored Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation and the American Musical (2011), a basis for the Peabody Award–winning documentary, “The Broadway Musical: A Jewish Legacy” (2013). He also co-edited Makeshift Chicago Stages: A Century of Theatre and Performance (2019). A member of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre, he served on the artistic staffs of both the Goodman and Wisdom Bridge theaters in Chicago and was founding chair of the Boston College Theatre Department. He is currently writing a book on Jane Addams’s Hull House and its theater.
LAURIE MCCANTS co-founded the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble (BTE) in 1978, where she co-created Hard Coal, Our Shadows (with Egypt’s Wamda), and Susquehanna: Mighty, Muddy, Crooked River of the Long Reach. In 2010, she was named an “Actor of Distinguished Achievement” through a Fox Foundation Fellowship. She served as board president of the national Network of Ensemble Theaters, and she is a trustee on the Board of the Theatre Communications Group. She was composer Julia Wolfe’s “coal region consultant” for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner Anthracite Fields. In 2016, she accepted BTE’s “Outstanding Theatre” award from the National Theatre Conference.
SHANNON A. MULLEN is a veteran journalist for national programs on public radio, including Marketplace, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition. Her print work has been published by the New Yorker, Boston Globe, and Boston Magazine, among others. Her first book, In Other Words, Leadership: How a Young Mother’s Weekly Letters to Her Governor Helped Both Women Brave the First Pandemic Year, was published in June 2023. She is also a playwright, a screenwriter, a film producer, and an amateur poet. She has a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Boston University and is based on the East Coast in the New England region.
STEPHEN J. ROJCEWICZ JR. is the author of Thornton Wilder, Classical Reception, and American Literature (2002). After forty years of practicing psychiatry, he received a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Maryland in 2017. He has published on Wilder, psychotherapy, hallucinations, Dostoevsky, the Sphinx, Zbigniew Herbert, James Joyce, Othello’s handkerchief, and Nobel Prize–winning novelist Olga Tokarczuk.
JULIE VATAIN-CORFDIR is associate professor at Sorbonne Université, where she specializes in American theater and translation, and a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is the author of Traduire la lettre vive (2012) and has edited several collections of essays, including American Dramaturgies for the 21st Century (2021), American Musicals: Stage and Screen / La scène et l’écran with Anne Martina (2019), and La Scène en version originale (2015). She has published several translations of Thornton Wilder’s major works into French.
HOWARD R. WOLF (1937–2023) was professor emeritus of English at SUNY-Buffalo. His “A Writer in the University, Going Home Train of Memory,” will appear in the Fall 2023 issue of Trajectory. His “On Writing: Experience and Imagination” is in the 2023 issue of Prosopisia (India). In 2016, he spent a few weeks at MacDowell where he had the privilege of using the stone cottage (studio) where Wilder had written a good deal of Our Town in 1937. He worked on a play, Home at the End of the Day, with a preface, “Portrait of a Fallen Star,” about the young actress who had played Emily in the “long ago summer” that he mentions in his response to DeGrazia’s talk.
Susan C. W. Abbotson, Christopher Benfey, Michael Y. Bennett, Hansong Dan, George Drance, Thierry Dubost, William Grange, David Greenspan, Noah Haidle, Stuart J. Hecht, Laurie McCants, Shannon A. Mullen, Stephen J. Rojcewicz, Julie Vatain-Corfdir, Howard R. Wolf; Responses to DeGrazia. Thornton Wilder Journal 31 October 2023; 4 (2): 149–199. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/thorntonwilderj.4.2.0149
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