The Stage Manager delivers an opening monologue in which he explains, matter-of-factly, that “the dead don’t stay interested in us living people for very long. … They get weaned away from the earth–that’s the way I put it, weaned away. Yes, they stay here while the earth-part of ‘em burns away, burns out, and all that time they slowly get indifferent to what’s goin’ on in Grover’s Corners.”
In a sensitive and thoughtful piece of writing Natalie Shapero in The Kenyon Review looks at Penelope Niven’s biography of Thornton Wilder.