Childhood
by Thornton Wilder

Name: Childhood
Brand: Thornton Wilder
SKU: 9780573620775
Rating: 3.56 (7 reviews)

Highlights

Small Cast

Female

Male

One Act 30 mins 1960s Ensemble Cast Bare Stage/Simple Set Contemporary Costumes/Street Clothes American Comedy

Synopsis

Thornton WilderComedyCharacters: 2 male, 3 female In this provocative, sometimes chilling comedy, Wilder renders a child's-eye view of the grown-up world, as a father, a mother and their three children play a revealing game of make-believe in which the children pretend to be orphans.

Startling truths emerge on both sides, as pretense challenges the family to discard the traditional roles of parent, spouse, child, and sibling--blurring the lines between perception and rea

Press Reviews

"Admirers of Thornton Wilder's virtuouso short plays will be glad to hear he has returned to the form in which he excels."
— Irving Wardle, London Times, March 16, 1973

"We often hear the phrase 'a winning child.' Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want."
— Thornton Wilder, The Paris Review Interviews, 1957

"I've been writing two plays (Ira and Childhood) that have dream sequences, and have become very attentive to what takes place in dreaming... In Childhood I use something I none too clearly remember from The Interpretation of Dreams (and by the light of that book, observed in my own dreaming): that an important person in one's dream, whom one's censor does not wish to identify or acknowledge, appears veiled or masked, or seen from the back only. So my children's father and mother."
— Thornton Wilder, Journal, March 24, 1960

Characters

Character	Gender	Age	Description
Dodie her sister, 10	female	—	her sister, 10
Billee her brother, 8	female	—	her brother, 8
Mother	—	—	—
Father	—	—	—
Caroline the oldest daughter, 12	female	—	the oldest daughter, 12