The Thornton Wilder Society will sponsor a session at the 2026 Comparative Drama Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, July 9-11. The session title is “New Focuses on Thornton Wilder: Race, War, and a Scottish Martyr.”
Thornton Wilder was one of the most literary American playwrights in the first half of the 20th century. By narrowing their focus, these three papers magnify details in Wilder’s plays, both famous and little-known, to examine previously unremarked upon (race), understudied (war), or undiscovered (Scottish martyr) characters, themes, and influences.
Abstracts:
Black Lives Matter: A Look at Race in The Skin of Our Teeth and Two One-acts
Lincoln Konkle
Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) is best known for Our Town (1938) which, because it is set in New Hampshire around the turn of the 20th-century, has no Black characters. (However, modern productions employ race-blind casting, as they do with The Skin of Our Teeth, which is well-suited to both plays’ allegory and universality.) But Wilder did include minor Black roles in The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) to begin with, and in an earlier one-act, Pullman Car Hiawatha (1931). In his last playwriting projects, The Seven Deadly Sins and The Seven Ages of Man, two one-act play cycles which he worked on during the late 1950s and early 1960s before abandoning them and turning back to the novel, Wilder wrote a Black protagonist in the eponymously titled Bernice, the only production of which took place in West Germany in 1957 with Ethel Waters in the lead role. The purpose of including these Black characters seems to have been to dramatize the message of this paper’s title: that Black lives—even in the 1930s and 1940s, and at the turn-of-the-century—did matter. From the “Negro chair-pushers” on the Atlantic City Boardwalk and the theater staff “colored girls” Hester and Ivy in The Skin of Our Teeth; to Harrison, the porter aboard the Pullman Car in that one-act; and finally to Bernice, the wise-by-experience maid in the one-act representing the deadly sin pride, Wilder showed that these Black characters have a right to speak and to be treated fairly by the justice system.
Appetite for War: Wilder’s Meditation on War in Three Plays
Shoshana Greenberg
Thornton Wilder wrote in a journal entry around 1950: “Tragically,… in our time we are accustomed to war, and custom is almost habit and habit is almost appetite” (1). For a playwright and novelist who wrote extensively on the human condition and humanity’s place in the cosmos, it is worth looking more closely at what he was trying to tell his audiences about humanity’s propensity for war. Wilder served in both world wars, and while The Skin of Our Teeth’s third act is probably the most direct expression of his thoughts on the subject, war is also referenced in Our Town and his one-act play The Long Christmas Dinner, though in more subtle yet still incisive ways. In this paper, I will look at Wilder’s thoughts on war in three of his plays. War has been discussed in passing in previous Wilder scholarship, but it has not been closely studied in his plays and novels to arrive at a holistic understanding of what Wilder shows and says about war. My paper is a start on this larger project by examining war and references to war in his best-known plays. For Wilder, war is not just a waste of young lives, as he shows in Our Town and The Long Christmas Dinner. There lies in his work a deeper meditation on why war exists and why it will continue.
Works Cited1: TNW, 1948-61 Journal, Entry 445, July 8 [1950?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
Emily’s Eternal Farewell in the Context of Scottish Martyr Hugh M’Kail’s 1666 Scaffold Speech
Owen Brown
Previous scholarly interpretations of Emily’s goodbye speech in Act 3 of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town can be grouped into three categories: the farewell as a description of the cathartic power of death, as a response to the suffering of this earth, or as an adieus to one’s beloved. To properly situate the meaning of Emily’s farewell one must understand it in relation both to Harriet’s farewell in Wilder’s earlier one-act play Pullman Car Hiawatha (1931), which Wilder scholars have pointed out is a prototype of Emily’s profound speech, and to the previously unacknowledged source for Harriet’s farewell, the last words of 17th-century Scottish martyr, Hugh M’Kail before he was hung for religious dissent in 1666. These sources highlight the eternal framework Emily is operating from when she bids goodbye to the world. Her farewell can be interpreted as the speech of one who has come to understand what earthly life means through the cathartic experience of not only death but more so of eternity. Tertiarily, it can be seen as Emily’s response to suffering, neither as one denying the pain of suffering nor as one overwhelmed by suffering, but rather as one who sets suffering in the context of eternity.
For more details about the 2026 Comparative Drama Conference, please visit the University of Wisconsin-Madison website.
