Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“Putting On Her White Hair” The Life Course In Wilder’S The Long Christmas Dinner, Valerie Barnes Lipscomb

English Sarasota Manatee Campus Faculty Publications

Thornton Wilder’s The Long Christmas Dinner (1931) holds a unique place in American drama, as it covers ninety years in the history of one family. The one-act play captivated composer Paul Hindemith, who collaborated with Wilder to adapt The Long Christmas Dinner as a 1961 short opera by the same name. Analyses of both works overlook the representation of age and aging on stage. Actors perform the aging of characters from young adulthood to death in just a few minutes of stage time, challenging the “difference” of age by suggesting the stability of human identity over the life course. One …