WORKS

Featured Work:
Pullman Car Hiawatha (1931)

By Jacobina Martin

Pullman Car Hiawatha was first published on November 5, 1931, in a volume entitled The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act. On March 19, 1932, the play had its first licensed performance at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Until after World War II, the play, and others in the volume, were performed chiefly by amateur groups using the book or other copies in typescript. An acting edition of the play was published in London in 1952. It was revived at the Circle in the Square Theater in 1993 and, again, at Baltimore's Center Stage, in January 2001.

Like many of Wilder's plays, the events in Pullman Car Hiawatha are choreographed by a Stage Manager, who serves as narrator, director, and occasional actor. He creates the set, directs the action, and guides the audience's outlook on the unfolding universe of the play. First, he explains that the set, a combination of balcony, stairs, and footlights, is a Pullman car traveling from New York to Chicago; the audience is to imagine this car as having an aisle and nine compartment, each with a lower and upper berth. He summons the actors onto the stage, directing them to set up their chairs in such a manner as to represent the inside of the berths.

Few of the characters have names; they are known instead by the location of their berths, such as Lower One, whom we come to know as "a maiden lady," or Lower Three, who, we discover, is a doctor. Only Mrs. Churchill, The Insane Woman who dominates the stage at several key moments, and a young couple, Philip and Harriet, have clearly given names. Harriet, a central figure, dies early in the play, but reappears touchingly as a ghost, no longer part of the journey; Mrs. Churchill, insistently referred to as The Insane Woman, is accompanied by two attendants to whom she constantly complains. Most of the characters occupy the lower berths. The Stage Manager assumes the voices of the few upper berth passengers.

At the beginning of the play, the characters get settled on the train and talk about the practicalities of the trip, such as a leaking hot water bottle or the need for an aspirin. Then, as the Stage Manager instructs (the passengers to talk, the audience to listen), they reveal their thoughts, hopes, and fears. Lower Five worries about the gifts she is taking to her family; Lower Seven's concerns are about the woman he is to meet in San Francisco, his final destination; Lower Nine has fears about money. All are concerned with the daily considerations of human life. Even the Porter is encouraged to reveal his thoughts, but he feels unworthy; his anxieties about his home and life insurance seem, to him, too simple to be considered. He is uncomfortable about talking, unaware that his concerns are the same as the passengers who command his services and attentions. The Stage Manager dismisses The Porter's discomfort as shyness.

The only passengers who speak at any length are The Insane Woman and the young couple Philip and his wife Harriet, who dies shortly after the journey begins. These three are given painful and difficult dialogue (or in the case of The Insane Woman, monologue. She has difficulty speaking with others.)

As soon as Harriet dies, the journey changes. The Stage Manager broadens the context of the journey, as if Harriet's death enlarges the play's context and importance. "All right," he says, "So much for the inside of the car. That'll be enough of that for the present. Now for its position geographically, meteorically, astronomically, theologically considered." First, he considers the journey "geographically." The passengers leave their berths to become the inhabitants of "Grover's Corners, Ohio,"(a village to be revived in Our Town) "Parkersburg, Ohio," and even "A Field," all components of the countryside through which the train travels. These areas, like the passengers of the Pullman car, voice their thoughts and concerns, and other characters, such as The Tramp and The Workman, who is the ghost of a German railway worker, speak of hardships far bleaker than those of the train's passengers. All quote poetry, attributing the lines crisply to their author. The Worker, a railway watchman worried that the train will be late, wants to speed the train along. The "signals are all right for this train," he says. The world is ticking along.

Having established the earthly context of the train, the Stage Manager enlarges the play's scope a second time, considering the world "meteorically" by asking A Mechanic about the regional weather. Next, the Stage Manager, expanding a bit from his set list of considerations, presents the journey "temporally considered." As he introduces time, in the form of three "beautiful girls, " the Hours of Ten, Eleven, and Twelve O'clock respectively, he comments, "Now for the Hours. The minutes are gossips, the hours are philosophers, the years are theologians." Twelve O'clock, he adds, is also the theologian. Each puts time into perspective through quoting passages from the philosophers, such as Epictetus and St. Augustine. For these three, time is the human condition as manifested by the words of philosophers; The Hours view time as human time, written in human terms.

The context shifts, grandly, one last time, as the Stage Manager reflects on the journey "astronomically considered," presenting the audience with the wordless, noisy Planets, whose humming is almost deafening. Like an orchestra conductor, the Stage Manager directs the entire cast of characters in a symphony of whispers, which includes all aspects of the journey: the passengers' whispering, the voices of the places through which the train passes, the overlooked ghost and workmen, the philosophical Hours, and the murmuring Planets. The journey's universe is harmonious.

But such universal harmony cannot last. Not everyone is included in the chorus. The Insane Woman breaks the euphony of the "Earth's Sound" by human despair and complaint: she feels useless, her insanity at odds with the gorgeous sound of the spheres. And so the Stage Manager again turns to his last category, the journey "theologically considered." He summons the divine world, notably the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, to guide The Insane Woman and Harriet to another sort of world and life, where they, the misfits on this journey, will belong. They will become inhabitants of a place filled with people like themselves, at odds with the context of the journey of the living, purposeful travelers on the train. The misfits in human life become at home in an afterlife, where they will "inherit the Earth." Once they leave, the universal orchestra, full of glory and harmony, can play again, and the train's passengers can reach their momentary destination, Chicago.

Pullman Car Hiawatha is a symphony of Wilder's ideas. The play examines many concerns explored in Wilder's longer works. As Gilbert A. Harrison, Wilder's biographer, remarks, "[Pullman Car Hiawatha] foreshadows techniques and themes Thornton would develop in Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth." In Our Town, Pullman's Grover's Corners, Ohio, becomes Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. Harriet's moving farewell speech renders her "…the forerunner of Our Town's Emily," as Harrison notes. The philosophic Hours of Pullman are reexamined in The Skin of Our Teeth, where Skin's Stage Manager, Mr. Fitzpatrick, comments, " . . . each of the hours of the night is philosopher or great thinker. Eleven o'clock, for instance, is Aristotle. And nine o'clock is Spinosa. Like that." Fizpatrick's commentary echoes that of the Stage Manager in Pullman. And finally, the dialogue of the train's inhabitants reflects the ordinariness of everyday life, just like the dialogue of The Happy Journey from Camden to Trenton, another journey through life. In some of Wilder's shorter one-act plays, such as Three-minute Plays for Three Persons, such dailiness of life is juxtaposed with a larger metaphysical reality, as in The Wreck on the 5:25. Pullman Car, like many Wilder plays, takes on an otherworldly quality by combining dialogue with sound, what is spoken with what is unspoken. The combination creates a reality larger than the stage or the play, pushing the limits of drama to the edge.

As in other plays, such as The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, Wilder uses the journey as both practical and metaphorical human transportation. "Thornton, who was himself so often on the move, saw the human journey as an endless movement through space and time," says Harrison. "What had an effect on Thornton was his cross-country lecture tour in the early thirties –the train rides, the glimpses of boardinghouses and shady hotels, salesmen on the road, waitresses, small town businessmen, housewives and their children." No character in the play is extraneous. If their lives are not revealed at length in dialogue or plot, all have opportunities to divulge their inner thoughts and concerns. Even the landscape, such as The Field, pleads the importance and rich history of the land and its inhabitants, gophers, mice, and snakes.

Wilder treats the play as a map. After a tight examination of the train and its passengers, we zoom out of the narrow context into the scenery. The panorama becomes wider as we come to the sky, the solar system, and eventually the heavens themselves. The lives of a few rather ordinary people are made extraordinary as we view them in the grand scheme of world order. And this, perhaps, is Wilder's point: no human is without importance, and yet all are humbled in the face of the vast universe. In Gilbert Harrison's words, "Millions came before you, millions will come after you, the playwright is saying; the universe is vast, time is indifferent to pride and ambition, do the best that you can in this short span, that's all you can do, God knows why – or perhaps God doesn't know."