Thornton Wilder in Collaboration: Collected Essays on His Drama and Fiction ed. by Jackson R. Bryer, Judith P. Hallett, and Edyta K. Oczkowicz (review)

In considering playwright Thornton Wilder's "collaborative" work in a variety of professional situations, this collection makes two important adjustments toward a more accurate conception of this writer's place in modern theatre history. First, it depicts Wilder as participating in a wave of collective creation in US theatre and dance that crested in the 1930s, as opposed to standing outside this broad movement, as he often has been historicized. A few essays in this book assist in this goal, most convincingly, David Roessel and Tori Novack's "'What Are You Waiting For?': Thornton Wilder, Clifford Odets, and American Drama in the Late 1930s," which offers a kind of "six degrees of separation" reading of a 1938 Theatre Arts Committee for Democracy cabaret sketch that parodies Our Town and Waiting for Lefty. Uncovering this forgotten sketch (reprinted in its entirety in the collection), Roessel and Novack connect the supposedly apolitical Wilder to the radical Odets, if not in a relationship of direct influence then at least in a relationship of shared "theatrical ancestry" (224).

Second (and related to the first adjustment), the book takes one of the most "literary" of US playwrights—Wilder, was, after all, first renowned as a novelist—and challenges assumptions about authority that traditionally accompany the concept of the modern writer: as singular, independent, and the sole determiner of a text's meaning. In other words, this collection reclaims Wilder as a theatrical writer, essentially collaborative in his process, whether he was writing the play The Skin of Our Teeth, the film Shadow of a Doubt, or the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. This adjustment to our concept of Wilder reminds readers that the "myth of the author," as Foucault would have it, is never more obvious than when it is unsuccessfully applied to the communal work of those who primarily make their living in the theatre.

The problem with this edited collection is the problem of many volumes that gather together conference papers (in this case, those presented at the 2015 Second International Thornton Wilder Conference): The effort to include so many loosely related essays results in a book that is too long and lacks the focus of a coherent whole. Editors Bryer, Hallett, and Oczkowicz do their best to sort this stack of essays into five thematic groups: Wilder in Literary and Intellectual Collaboration, Wilder in Collaboration with Dramatic Traditions, Wilder in Collaboration with Fictional Traditions, Wilder in Collaboration with Contemporary Colleagues, and Performing and Interpreting Wilder Collaboratively Today. However, the essay placement seems rather arbitrary, with many essays working as well in one category as in another.

Moreover, as a volume that embraces collaboration in the "broadest sense" of the word (viii), it would have been useful to have the contributors respond and react to one another's work—or for the editors to have brought together disparate readings of Wilder's plays for productive conversation. For example, it would be interesting to see how Macy McDonald's reading of Our Town as intellectually indebted to Sartre and Heidegger, culminating in the depiction of "an indefinite afterlife" employed to "torture [characters] with their own inauthenticity" (34), jibes with Howard Wolf's description of the play as one in which "light prevails over darkness" (50). A similar missed opportunity for productive conversation lies in Lincoln Konkle's description of Wilder's plays as "postmodern," in opposition "to the realism and naturalism of the late-nineteenth century theatre as developed by Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, and Shaw" (14), a reading that seems juxtaposed to Sarah Littlefield's assertion that Wilder's novel Theophilus North was in deep collaboration with Ibsen's A Doll's House (197). An edited collection should not be tasked with finding consensus among its contributors, of course. Nevertheless, the many parallels and disagreements raised...