Fanny Otcott

“Mrs. Otcott, that great actress in the tradition of the Siddons, the Oldfield, Bracegirdle and O’Neill, is spending a quiet month in Wales.”

Mrs. Otcott is sorting through the artifacts of her past when an old lover appears. He’s a former actor, now married, a father, and nothing less than an Anglican Bishop with ambitions – i.e., a man of the cloth who needs to be sure that an earlier chapter of his life is safely buried away.

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

Wilder wrote this play in the summer of 1917, between his last semester at Oberlin and his first at Yale. It was published as That Other Fanny Otcott in The Yale Literary Magazine in April 1918, and produced by the Yale University Dramatic Association in December 1917, together with The Message and Jehanne, the first performance of Wilder’s plays in New Haven, the community where he would live until his death in 1975. Fanny Otcott marks the first significant appearance of the actress as character in Wilder’s drama and fiction.