This week’s New Yorker has an extraordinary review of Thornton Wilder’s hoary classic Our Town.
Extraordinary because reviewer Hilton Als begins with criticism of Thornton Wilder the man and playwright that is so sharp it’s almost bitter, then moves to all but dismissing his best-known play, and then finally redeems the play – somewhat – by praising a new production and in particular the actresses in it.
But his words of criticism are token gestures to his occupation task compared to an anecdote he quotes about Wilder from Tennessee Williams. Turns out that Wilder himself was gay, but closeted, and worse, when Williams opened in New Haven what is surely the greatest American work of words of the last century – A Streetcar Named Desire – Wilder had nothing good to say about it.
In his memoirs, Williams recalls…
We were invited to the quarters of Mr. Thornton Wilder, who was in residence there. It was like having a papal audience. We all sat about this academic gentleman while he put the play down as if delivering a papal bull. He said that it was based on a fatally mistaken premise. No female who had ever been a lady (he was referring to Stella) could possibly marry a vulgarian such as Stanley….I thought, privately, This character has never had a good lay. I got back at him years later when a bunch of theatre people were invited, during the Kennedy administration, to a banquet at the White House. All of us theatre folk were told to line up in alphabetical order…And here was Thorton Wilder bustling about like a self-appointed field marshal, seeing that we were arranged….Mr. Wilder rushed up to me with the radiant smile of a mortician and shrieked, “Mr. Williams, you’re a bit out of place, you come behind me.” Well, I was just stoned enough to say to him, “If I am behind you it’s the first and last time in my life.”
Moral of the story: Don’t throw stones at the man on the other side of the river – you might need his help in getting across.
Kit Stolz 
I loved that anecdote too, and the story has many morals, one of them being: “never be condescending to brilliant queens who can write because they will get their revenge eventually.” Tennessee Williams’ good friend Gore Vidal is another good example of that axiom. Vidal wrote a wonderful essay/review decades ago in the “New York Review of Books” when Williams’ “Memoirs” came out, basically calling it a pack of inventions, but forgiving him because the writing was so great. Even if the Wilder White House story isn’t true, it should be.
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