The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden

The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden
A 1952 production of The Happy Journey at Shimer College
Written by	Thornton Wilder
Characters	The Stage Manager Ma, Mrs. Kate Kirby Arthur, her son Caroline, her daughter Pa, Ma's husband Elmer Beulah, the Kirbys' married daughter who lives in Camden
Date premiered	November 25, 1931
Place premiered	Yale University theater in New Haven, Connecticut
Original language	English
Subject	a family travels by motorcar to visit a daughter in Camden
Genre	Comedy
Setting	the road going from Trenton to Camden in New Jersey

The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden is a one act play by American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder written in 1931. It was first published in The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act (New York: Coward-McCann, 1931).

The first production of The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden was by the Yale Dramatic Association and the Vassar College Philalethis at the Yale University theater in New Haven, Connecticut on November 25, 1931. It opened on Broadway at the Cort Theatre on March 16, 1948 in a production starring Peggy Allenby as Ma Kirby and Don MacLaughlin as Elmer. A production by Theodore Mann at the Circle in the Square Theatre which opened on April 21, 1993 won both a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play.

Almost the entire play takes place during an automobile journey from Newark to Camden, New Jersey by a family on their way to visit a married daughter, who has recently lost a baby in childbirth. Very little happens, but the father, mother, and children reminisce, joke, and sightsee and somehow, in classic Thornton Wilder fashion, capture something of the universal joy and sadness of life as they motor along.

Comparing this play with his later masterpiece, Our Town, Wilder said in 1974, "In my plays I attempted to raise ordinary daily conversation between ordinary people to the level of the universal human experience." In his "Notes to the Producer" written in 1931, Wilder stated that:

Eric Specian in an overview of the play says.