Thornton Wilder Estate Goes Outside Family For New Literary Executor As Interest In Playwright’s Work Surges

Greg Evans
·5 min read
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EXCLUSIVE: With interest in the great 20th Century American writer Thornton Wilder about to get one of its periodic surges – a major Broadway revival of Our Town is coming this year, and Hello, Dolly!, the musical based on Wilder’s 1954 play The Matchmaker, will open on London’s West End this summer in a revival starring The Crown‘s Imelda Staunton – the estate guarding the author’s works has named its first non-family Literary Executor in 28 years to oversee all of its intellectual properties.

Jeremy McCarter, the former New York Magazine drama critic and co-author with Lin-Manuel Miranda of the bestselling behind-the-scenes non-fiction book Hamilton: The Revolution, has been named Literary Executor of the Wilder Family LLC. He assumes the role this month from Thornton Wilder’s nephew Tappan Wilder, who has held the post since 1995.

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Tappan Wilder announced McCarter’s appointment to Deadline today. McCarter will serve as a chief guardian of the Our Town author’s vast collection of plays, fiction and nonfiction writing, music and archival holdings.

In a statement to Deadline, Tappan Wilder, the Managing Member of the Wilder Family LLC, said the appointment will allow McCarter “to make decisions regarding Thornton Wilder’s intellectual properties and the estate’s ongoing relationships with its agents and institutional partner.”

Wilder said the estate has tasked McCarter “to devote special time and energy to the adaptation possibilities in [Thornton] Wilder’s full range of works.”

Continued the playwright’s nephew, “From the scholar to the reader to the audience down the street, the intriguing story of my uncle’s life and work remains a still very much unfolding tale. My family and I are thrilled that Jeremy McCarter, a person with such wide-ranging accomplishments and interests, has agreed to help tell it.”

The theater world is experiencing something of a Wilder boom. In 2022, the first-ever Broadway revival of The Skin of Our Teeth, Wilder’s Pulitzer-winning 1942 modernist epic, was staged by Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, with Lileana Blain-Cruz directing a cast that included Gabby Beans and Roslyn Ruff. The production received six Tony Award nominations, with Montana Levi Blanco winning for costume design.

Following this summer’s limited Hello, Dolly! engagement at the London Palladium (July 6-September 14), which reunites Staunton with her multiple-Olivier-winning Follies director Dominic Cooke, Broadway will see a 2024 production of Our Town, directed by Kenny Leon, a Tony winner for 2014’s A Raisin in the Sun starring Denzel Washington and LaTanya Richardson Jackson and most recently on Broadway with the 2020 revival of A Soldier’s Play. Production dates and cast for Our Town have not been announced, but the revival is expected for this fall.

Elsewhere, Houston’s Alley Theater will present a world premiere of Wilder’s unfinished The Emporium in May in an adaptation completed by Kirk Lynn and directed by Rob Melrose, while Ethan Lipton’s musical adaptation of The Skin of Our Teeth remains in development.

Off stage, Wilder’s Our Town inspired and was featured prominently in Ann Patchett’s bestselling 2023 novel Tom Lake.

The Wilder library encompasses an extensive bibliography of works, from opera libretti to various works of nonfiction including letters, essays and conversations. Thornton Wilder was the author of seven novels, including The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Ides of March, The Eighth Day and Theophius North. During Tappan Wilder’s nearly 30 years as Literary Executor, all of his uncle’s works have returned to print, including a major re-issue of the novels and most significant plays by HarperCollins.

“Thornton Wilder is my favorite writer,” said McCarter, “a restless innovator, an enviable stylist, a genius with an uncanny ability to see the cosmos and our tiny-but-enormous place in it. I’m honored and deeply grateful to the Wilder Family for a chance to be a steward of his work – to help more readers and viewers and listeners to discover it, and find ways for artists to go on being inspired by it, as it has always inspired me.”

McCarter’s affiliation with the Wilder estate began as an adviser to Tappan Wilder, and included his writing an introduction, at the estate’s request, for the 2020 re-release of Wilder’s 1948 novel The Ides of March. During a five-year tenure on the artistic staff of New York’s Public Theater, McCarter established the company’s tradition of staging an annual holiday reading and discussion of Wilder’s 1931 one-act play The Long Christmas Dinner.

Outside the Wilder world, McCarter teamed with Miranda on both the 2016 Hamilton: The Revolution book and 2021’s In the Heights: Finding Home (also with Quiara Alegria Hudes). In addition to New York Magazine, his cultural writing has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal.

Most recently, McCarter founded and is the executive producer of Make-Believe Association, an audio storytelling company, and he is a co-creator of Lake Song, the company’s audio-drama series selected in 2022 as an official selection of the Tribeca Festival. He wrote the 2017 nonfiction book Young Radicals, edited the 2009 essay collection Bite the Hand that Feeds You: Essays and Provocations by Henry Fairlie, and wrote the liner notes for the 2006 Broadway revival cast album of Stephen Sondheim’s Company.

Tappan Wilder will continue in his capacity as a Managing Member of the Thornton Wilder LLC, and remain the liaison with the Thornton Wilder Society. Rosey Strub continues in her role as the LLC’s Managing Director, and Amanda Wood is in charge of special projects.

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