Centaurs

“A Theatre... The usual chattering audience is waiting for the curtains to part…”

Are ideas original? Or do ideas float around, ready at a moment’s notice to be appropriated by the grasping artist? Shelley and Ibsen and Hilda Wangel, one of Ibsen’s most famous characters, star in this consideration of these questions. These three figures wait in the wings of a darkened theater for a performance of Ibsen’s The Master Builder. The curtains part, but before the actors can begin, Shelley steps forward to claim that he wrote at least part of the play. Hilda Wangel mediates the dispute that follows between poet and playwright on the topic of the sources of art and the “miracle” of ideas and “great poems.”

Centaurs is an early example of Wilder intermingling time and history, as he would do later in such later works as The Cabala (1926) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942).

This short play is included in the collection Thornton Wilder's Playlets: Short, Short Plays for 3-5 Persons.

Centaurs was first published in April 1920 in S4N, a “little magazine” of the period, as The Death of the Centaur: A Footnote to Ibsen. Wilder wrote this playlet in the summer of 1918 when he was deeply worried about the impact of World War I on his generation. Would he and his peers survive the war to do the work they aspired to do? Or would they, like Shelley, die young? In a note accompanying the manuscript, he wrote that he felt “a regret for the unwritten work of young poets dead,” a theme voiced in a line in the play: “the work that has been lost through this war...” Wilder conceived this playlet to be part a series of “Footnotes to Biographies” suggested by the miniature portraits in Herbert Eulenberg’s Schattenbilder.