<i>The Dreamers: A Play in Four Acts</i> by Thornton Wilder

Abstract Written no later than 1920, before he went to Rome to study at the American Academy, and unpublished and unperformed to date, The Dreamers is an early example of Thornton Wilder experimenting with dramatic form by using the play within a play structure he would later employ most famously in The Skin of Our Teeth, and doubling roles in a purposeful way. The Dreamers opens at the New Hampshire estate of Mr. and Mrs. Craigie. After dinner the elderly couple’s weekend guests decide to improvise a play about a knight during the time of the Crusades. The two youngest guests, Charles and Mayd, play the lead roles in the “inner play”: Vecy-Segal, an apprentice knight of the Order of the Holy Graal, and his sister (also called Mayd within the inner play), who goes in search of him when he doesn’t return home. Both are nearly sold at the slave market in Alexandria, Egypt, but Mayd persuades their captor, Odo-Buran, the captain of a ship, to mitigate their fates. Mayd serves Anactoria, a former dancer turned priestess, and Vecy-Segal helps the crusaders lay siege to Jerusalem. The siblings are reunited at the cave of a hermit and will return home. The Craigies’ party guests complete the play and at least one of them is transformed by the experience of acting a role related to her real-life situation.