Ethan Hawke, Jose Llana and More to Join THE LONG CHRISTMAS DINNER FESTIVAL

Thornton Wilder’s holiday classic The Long Christmas Dinner, first produced in 1931, will be presented by more than 30 community-facing organizations all across the country this November and December as part of THE LONG CHRISTMAS DINNER FESTIVAL. The Festival marks the beginning of a new tradition of sharing a holiday story with family and friends, alongside A Christmas Carol, The Nutcracker and Handel’s Messiah. In the course of a single unbroken holiday meal, 90 years of a family’s history fly by in this moving, funny, sometimes sorrowful, ingeniously theatrical 40-minute one-act play.

THE LONG CHRISTMAS DINNER FESTIVAL will kick off in New York City on Monday, November 2 with a performance at The Public Theater, featuring a cast that will include Ethan Hawke and Jose Llana, as well as Tappan Wilder, who is Thornton’s nephew and the managing member of the Wilder Family LLC, with more casting to be announced soon. The holiday tradition of reading and discussing the play began at the Public in 2013 as part of the popular Public Forum series of performances and conversations.

Anthony Rapp, a member of the original cast of RENT, as well as the musician, author, leader of the band Wilco, and all-around Chicago icon Jeff Tweedy will be part of The Long Christmas Dinner at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. Complete casting will be announced soon for other participating organizations around the country.

The first wave of participating organizations announced so far includes 31 theaters, schools and bookstores in 20 states, stretching from Alaska to Florida, from California to Maine, and many places in between. The lineup includes some of the country’s most acclaimed theaters, all of whom have a recent history with Wilder’s plays (The Public Theater, The Goodman Theater, Seattle Rep, Miami New Drama, Pasadena Playhouse, Rude Mechs) as well as high schools, independent bookstores, and colleges (including Vassar and Yale, where students collaborated to stage the play’s world premiere in 1931). More organizations are expected to join the already confirmed 31 participants this inaugural year.

Some of these companies are presenting a full production of Wilder’s play, which the legendary director Tyrone Guthrie called “one of the truly great plays of the human spirit.” Others will present a staged reading of the play followed by a discussion of its themes (time, tradition, family, the stories we tell). The Wilder Estate has foregone a licensing fee for any organization that wishes to present a reading and discussion of the play for their community.

Many of the casts will feature a mix of actors and community members. In Minneapolis, Mixed Blood Theatre will feature their neighbors from the company’s predominantly East African neighborhood alongside professional actors; in Severna Park, Maryland, the booksellers of Park Books will perform the play for their customers; in Juneau, Theater Alaska will read and discuss the play live on the air on KTOO, the local public radio station in Alaska’s capital city.

Through a partnership with Educational Theatre Foundation (ETF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to broadening representation and increasing access to theater education, the Wilder Estate has made The Long Christmas Dinner available to high schools that might otherwise lack the resources to work on the play.

ABOUT THE LONG CHRISTMAS DINNER

“I shall sit in this house beside you forever, as though life were one long, happy Christmas dinner.”

Before he penned Our Town, Thornton Wilder wrote this holiday masterpiece in which audiences, over 40 minutes, get to watch four generations of a family come and go, discovering which traditions endure, and leaving the theater seeing themselves and their own families more clearly. It was first produced November 25, 1931, not on Broadway but in a joint performance by the Yale Dramatic Association and the Vassar Philalethesis. The play, along with five of his other one-acts, was first published by Coward-McCann and Yale University Press as The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act. Most recently, it was published in November 2025 by HarperPerennial in the new collection of Wilder’s work, Our Town and the Cosmic One-Acts. Over the years, many artists have drawn inspiration from this little play with big ideas. Legendary director Tyrone Guthrie called it “the greatest play of our epoch.” Orson Welles admitted to drawing liberally from its premise to create the famous breakfast table scene in Citizen Kane, when the entire history of a marriage unfolds in clips over the same meal. In 1961, Wilder himself collaborated with composer Paul Hindemith to turn his play into an opera. Recent homages include The Long Christmas Ride Home by Paula Vogel, Dan LeFranc’s The Big Meal and Noah Haidle’s Birthday Candles.

THE LONG CHRISTMAS DINNER FESTIVAL 2026

(Confirmed participants of October 7, 2026)

Photo Credit: The Wilder