From Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater
“It is a discouraging business to be an author at sixteen years of age,” wrote Thornton Wilder at the ripe old age of thirty-one. “His poor overblotted notebooks show nothing to prove to others, or to himself, that the claim is justified.” Precocious teenagers—and he includes his younger self among them—eagerly assemble the basics (“especially the title”) of a long book, or they spend hours “adjusting the tables of contents of works they have neither the perseverance nor the ability to execute.”
Wilder made these comments in the foreword to his 1928 collection, The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays. “This book is what is left of one of these projects,” he admitted. Over the previous fifteen years, Wilder had written about forty “three-minute plays,” having “discovered a literary form that satisfied my passion for compression.” Wilder selected sixteen of them for the book; they were designed more to be read than performed, although several of them have been staged at various times during the last century. The book went on to sell over 10,000 copies, which is remarkable for a book of plays—especially considering it was a full decade before Wilder made his Broadway debut with Our Town.
Most of the playlets, Wilder wrote in the foreword, “are religious, but religious in that dilute fashion that is a believer’s concession to a contemporary standard of good manners.” The final four in the book, however, “plant their flag as boldly as they may.” They were also the last written, having been completed in the eighteen months before the volume’s publication.
Among them is “Mozart and the Gray Steward,” the longest in the collection—a six-minute play, one might say. Skillfully blending both fact and legend, the playlet depicts Mozart’s encounter with the mysterious “messenger in gray” who arrived with the commission for his famous Requiem, which remained unfinished at the composer’s death.
“Mozart and the Gray Steward” is our Story of the Week selection, along with an introduction describing the myths—and the truth—behind the creation of the Requiem and explaining how Wilder’s play reflects his own beliefs about what transforms a piece of music or literature into art.
