Inspired by Dreiser's Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural, Wilder's Angel That Troubled the Waters consists of sixteen three-minute plays for three actors. The plays draw upon history, legend, and invention; the staging directions are elaborate, the dialogue pretentious, and the plays are interesting only as evidence of Wilder's early disinclination for the dominant realist mode, which prefigures his lifelong rebellion against the box-set…. More mannered than the dialogue of Dreiser's "supernatural plays," that of Wilder also drowns its substance.

Having traveled to study non-realistic staging in France and Germany, Wilder showed considerably more dramatic skill in his second volume of plays, The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays (1931). The three least interesting plays are Pirandellian in their treatment of the fictional process and its problematic relation to life. The three other plays experiment with stage space and time. (p. 212)

[Our Town is] Wilder's pernicious portrait of...