At the end of November, our Level 3 Acting and Backstage students performed their Christmas Show, The Long Christmas Dinner by Thornton Wilder.
April 17, 2022 marked the 125th anniversary of Thornton Wilder’s birth. In April 2022, the Level 3 Actors performed Thornton Wilder’s extraordinary Pulitzer Prize winning play, The Skin of Our Teeth.
Director and Course Leader, Irene Rambota said,
‘Last week, we were thrilled to have the opportunity to explore another example of Wilder’s genius as a writer: The Long Christmas Dinner, a short play which spans 90 years of Christmas dinners in the Bayard family home. It was first produced on November 25, 1931 at the Yale University Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut - exactly 91 years to the day before our Friday night performance. The fact that 90 years are traversed in this play and exactly 91 years elapsed between the day of the very first production and the day of our own last performance was quite momentous for us!! Akin to Ancient Greek plays, Thornton Wilder’s stories engender a familiarity of experience that allow audiences to feel a collective shared understanding and deep connection to character, story and each other.
Here, Wilder’s brilliance lies in his ability to condense the human experience into one family, threading universal themes into personal stories of joy and sorrow. It is a complex and deeply poignant story which affected members of the audience in profoundly moving ways.
The feedback we received was very touching. Hearing that the play motivated people to reconnect with relatives they hadn’t seen for a long time or to strengthen bonds with their immediate family was so heart-warming. That’s our job as storytellers - to generate connections.”
Photos taken by Backstage Theatre student, Luke Perera.
We would like to thank all the students that were a part of the show, with a special mention to Level 3 Acting graduates, Rosie Hunt and Aaron King, who took on character roles in the show and Ben Welshman, who played live music throughout.
