Return of a Native

THE LONG CHRISTMAS DINNER-- Thornton Wilder--Yale Press & Coward-McCann ($2.50).

When Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey burst into the best-seller lists, loud was the clucking from the critics' henroost. Drowned in the almost unanimous cackle of praise were a few deprecatory chirps, chiefly to the effect that it was a pity Author Wilder had not chosen a U. S. scene. When The Angel That Troubled the Waters and The Woman of Andros showed him still far from home, deprecatory chirps became louder. In The Long Christmas Dinner, a collection of six one-act plays no commercial producer would care to put on. Author Wilder has returned at last to the U. S. But The Long Christmas Dinner will give little aid & comfort to patriotic critics: no potential bestseller, its appeal is limited to the intelligentsia, for the affluent of whom there is a special edition of 500 copies (autographed, $12).

The title-play is like Alice's mad tea-party in Wonderland. At a continuous Christmas dinner lasting from before the Civil War to the present you watch a midwestern family pass from one generation to another. New characters appear; old ones go out the dark portal of death; as they get older they put on white wigs. As they grow up they say the same things their fathers & mothers said.

In "Pullman Car Hiawatha" you are supposed to imagine, with the aid of a few chairs placed vis-a-vis, the interior of a Pullman on its way from Manhattan to Chicago. The action, which starts off realistically enough, goes rapidly symbolic: Archangels Gabriel and Michael, other such un-humdrum figures appear. Of the other plays two ("Queens of France," "Love and How to Cure It") are farces; two out-realize Belasco.

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