About the Play:

The Ages of Man is a collection of four short plays by Thornton Wilder. Inspired by Shakespeare's famous monologue about the ages of life, Thornton Wilder wrote: Infancy, Childhood, Youth, and Rivers Under The Earth. The four play cycle is a witty, wise, magical investigation into the human heart at different stages. Infancy and Childhood are especially recommended for school and contest use.

Published in a single acting edition, Thornton Wilder's The Ages of Man includes four one-act plays, each capturing an important stage of life:

Infancy: Millie the nursemaid brings baby Tommy to Central Park in the hopes of a rendezvous with the handsome Patrolman Avonzino. Mrs. Boker soon arrives with baby Moe, and as the two ladies trade snacks and advice on child rearing, the infants compare notes on their parents' bad behavior and pitiful lack of understanding. Babies act like grown-ups and grown-ups act like babies in this comedy about fulfilling basic human needs. (Cast: 3 female, 2 male)

Childhood is a clever and thought-provoking look at the macabre games of childhood and how children are brave enough to act out the very things they fear the most. Thornton 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 imagine that their parents are dead. When they take a fantasy bus ride, 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 reality, artifice and innocence. Childhood shows us what deficient parents we've had and what flawed parents we are to our children. (Cast: 3 female, 2 male)

Youth: To his horror, the middle-aged Captain Gulliver finds himself marooned, dying of hunger and thirst in "The Country of The Young" – a world of youth so mistrustful of age that anyone approaching 30 is ritually dispatched. Here, he encounters an ersatz aristocracy and servant class who are both appalled by and attracted to what they see in him. By virtue of age alone, he represents everything they hate – the old men immortalized in their books who have sent younger men off to war; old men who frustrate and thwart the young in order to keep themselves in power. Yet he appeals to their latent humanity and their need to do something other than just play at childish games. Through his cunning and wisdom, Gulliver manages to gain the trust of one of his female captors and enlist the help of a talented servant-class carpenter. Together they make a narrow escape, the two young islanders looking forward to the promise of a new world in which people may someday see their children grow into manhood and womanhood and hold their grandchildren on their knees. Conceived in the 1960s, amid a youthful population who had discovered for the first time its social and political clout, Youth might well have been Wilder's satirical meditation on the excesses of America. More than just a jab at a particular decade and the foibles of Utopian idealism of young people everywhere, however, Youth demonstrates Wilder's ever-generous spirit and his lifelong belief in community and the contributions of every individual. (Cast: 3 female, 2 male)

The Rivers Under the Earth: On a point of land jutting into a lake in southern Wisconsin, the Carter family enjoys a summer's eve. It's an evening like many others: Nothing happens and everything happens. Each member of the family – 16-year-old Tom, his 17-year-old sister Francesca and their parents, Mr. and Mrs. Carter – shares different memories somehow connected with their surroundings. These memories color the mood of the evening. Young Tom nearly gets into a fight over a girlfriend, whose name, Violet, recalls a key image from his childhood. Francesca never liked this promontory and though she's not sure why, her parents recall their daughter burying a dead robin in that very spot. Mr. and Mrs. Carter struggle with their middle-age in the context of poignant personal memories of moments experienced on that section of rock. Throughout the action, Wilder weaves a tapestry of animosities and affections, memories and confessions, conscious and unconscious behaviour and the unfathomable formation of identity. (Cast: 3 female, 2 male)

Infancy and Childhood were first produced in 1962 at the Circle in the Square Theater Off-Broadway in Greenwich Village, as two of three plays grouped as "Plays for Bleecker Street" that ran for 349 performances. They are both particularly suitable for schools and play contests.

What people say:

"Admirers of Thornton Wilder's virtuouso short plays will be glad to hear he has returned to the form in which he excels." — The Daily Times (London)

About the Playwright:

Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) was an acclaimed American novelist and playwright whose works, exploring the connection between the commonplace and cosmic dimensions of human experience, continue to be read and produced around the world. He also enjoyed enormous success with many other forms of the written and spoken word, among them teaching, acting, the opera, and cinema. A three time Pulitzer Prize winner and the only winner for both fiction and drama, his many honours include the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Book Committee's Medal for Literature.