“A great pool of water... The pool: a vast gray hall with a hole in the ceiling open to the sky.”
A doctor in need, a newcomer, arrives at the site of a great pool to which come the blind and malformed seeking cures when the Angel stirs the waters. But the Angel denies healing to this healer on the grounds that his very illness is required in order for him to heal others. Instead, a mistaken invalid is made whole. The theme explored here, that to heal one must suffer, recurs throughout Wilder’s plays and novels.
In his Foreword to The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays, published in 1928, Wilder explained that almost all the playlets in the book are religious, “but religious in that dilute fashion that is a believer’s concession to a contemporary standard of good manners.” He wanted to explore religious themes and questions without being preachy, or didactic. “Didacticism is an attempt at the coercion of another’s free mind,” he wrote, and that was not his intention. In fact, it was often his intention in such playlets as this one to stand the biblical story on its head -to shake up the language, as it were. He also said–about his plays dealing with religious themes and stories–that in “these matters beyond logic, beauty is the only persuasion.”
This short play is included in the collection Thornton Wilder's Playlets: Short, Short Plays for 3-5 Persons.