Wilder has known German since an early age. As a child he was sent to a German school in Hong Kong. Further, there is abundant evidence that he extended his knowledge of German and German literature with maturity: some of the lines in his early plays are in German; his first published collection of drama, The Angel that Troubled the Waters and Other Plays, published in 1928, is dedicated to Max Reinhardt; he visited Berlin in 1928, at the time when Brecht's plays were receiving considerable notice; much later, it might be added, Brecht and Wilder attempted collaboration on … a project which subsequently never materialized. But the main evidence is in the plays themselves. (p. 112)
Theatricalism as it applies to Brecht and Wilder restores the theater's reality as theater while destroying the illusion of reality. Instead of attempting to imitate reality it essays, more boldly than subtly, the perception of reality through symbol. The central idea, for instance, is suggested iteratively by a "succession of events."… Brecht's and Wilder's theater, then, is theater which draws attention to itself as theater.
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