China and the West

Wilder, Thornton. Our town : a play in three acts. (New York, N.Y. : Harper & Row, 1938). [Uraufführung McCarter Theater, Princeton, New Jersey, January 22, 1938].
Wilder, Thornton. A preface for Our town. (1938). In : Wilder, Thornton. American characteristics and other essays [ID D30361]. [Not published].
In the Spanish theater Lope de Vega put a rug in the middle of the scene – it was a raft in mid-ocean bearing a castaway. The Elizabethans, the Chinese used similar devices.

Sekundärliteratur
Y.T. Luk : Wilder uses no front curtain, no scenery, and no properties, except a few chairs and ladders ; he has a Stage Manager come out to chat with the audience and point out what they are to imagine on the stage, to move chairs, and occasionally to become a character of the performance – the soda fountain clerk as well as the minister of wedding. He learned this theatricalist mode from Peking opera, with which he was quite familiar. From the non-illusionist approach in Chinese theatre, Wilder recognized that even the important events of everyday life can be presented by actors on an open platform, reacting not to a realistic setting but to the private thoughts and personal relations of the characters in the fictive world on that platform. From this Chinese make-believe on the stage, he realized the fundamental conditions of drama – that is, that the theatre is an art which reposes upon the work of many collaborators ; it is addressed to a group mind based on a pretense, its very nature calls out a multiplication of pretenses, and its action takes place in a perpetually present time. The conventionalized performance of Chinese acting, in spite of its blatant theatricality, convinced him that convention was very important in the interaction between actors and the audience, that it was an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie to provoke collaborative activity of the spectator's imagination and raise the action from the specific to the general.

Chen Xiaoming : Like Gao Xingjian's Wildman, a Chinese play, Wilder's Our town, an 'Oriental' play, achieves an epic dimension by showing, in the first act, a flashback scene in the past - 'a day in our town', May 7, 1901 – an ordinary day that everyone of us lives. Both plays share the same timeless, episodic structure that presents a macrocosmic view of life. Both plays constantly employ the present time of the play to symbolize a larger temporal view of past, present, and future. Both plays are about much more than simply Emily and George, or an ecologist and a Wildman. Both are in some sense stories of mankind, of its historical past and contemporary reality, its struggle against time and its efforts to preserve natural life and cultural heritage. Both plays are narrated by insightful observers – the Stage Manager and the Ecologist – who convey to the audience their apprehensions over the meaning of life and their nostalgic feelings for an irreversible past.
Haberman, Donald C. The plays of Thornton Wilder : a critical study. (Middletown, Conn. : Wesleyan University Press, 1969).
Haberman claims that Wilder demanded from the actors of Our town that 'they attempt something like Mei Lanfang's expression of a reality above the casual and a permanence beyond the brevity of each performance.

Lee Sang-kyong : Wilder verzichtet bewusst auf Kulisse und grosse Requisiten, um das Drama von seinem Illusionscharacter zu befreien und der Einbildungskraft des Zuschauers freien Spielraum zu lass. So genügten ihm, entsprechend der Nô-Bühne und der Bühne des chinesischen Theaters, einige Stühle und Tische als Bühnenrequisiten, um das Wesentliche der Realität darzustellen.

Lifton, Paul. Thornton Wilder's minimalist plays : mingling Eastern and Western traditions. In : Crosscurrents in the drama : East and West. Ed., Stanley Vincent Longman.

(Tuscaloosa, AL : Southeastern Theatre Conference and the University of Alabama Press, 1998). (Theatre symposium (Tuscaloosa, Ala.) ; vol. 6, 1998).
http://books.google.ch/books?id=UT8yEd2CVssC&pg=PA76&lpg=PA76&dq=thornton+wilder
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Paul Lifton : While he was working on Our town, Thornton Wilder describes the play in a 1937 postcard to a friend as utilizing 'the technique of Chinese drama', and the 'Chinese' features of the piece did not escape the the notice of reviewers of the original production. Several of them compared it to The yellow jacket. Many other critics also identified the Stage Manager as a variant of the Chinese property man and other features of the pantomime, as 'Chinese' or quasi-Chinese as well.
Wilder's interest in pantomime was apparently sparked by a performance by Mei Lanfang. Several of Wilder's shorter play in the minimalist vein also reflect Mei Lanfang's influence and exhibit parallels, too, with other Asian traditional theatres besides the Chinese. On the other hand, he appears to have been uninterested in or unaware of many nonminimalist aspects of Asian theatre. His borrowing was always highly selective. Certainly the lavish, symbolic, and highly theatrical costumes and makeup or masks, the extraordinary and specialized vocal techniques, the exaggerated or symbolic gestures, and the acrobatic or the unnaturally restrained movements of the nô, kabuki, and Chinese opera find no counterparts in his dramatic universe.