A couple of quotes relevant to The Happy Journey:

[On Wilder's two 1931 one-act plays]: "These two plays are as avant-garde as all get-out, yet there is almost nothing in them that an ordinary audience cannot absorb immediately and directly -- even today, when many of their cultural references have faded. And the short plays blow the whistle on the false assumption that has dogged Wilder for decades—that their ease of absorption comes from the ideas being conventional, or his treatment of them sentimental. . . . [Wilder] made it his mission to return to square one, rebuilding the family unit as the substance of a new, open-form drama that could test society's familial assumptions instead of taking them for granted -- a notion as radical in its own way as Brecht's. Wilder, you might say, anticipated contemporary corporate ethics by making transparency of artifice his aesthetic principle. Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth show how effectively he made the mainstream accept his terms. If nobody blinks at a thousand things done on Broadway today that the pre-Wilder theater would have called avant-garde, Wilder's success is one of the principal causes, so much so that worshippers of the avant-garde 'tradition' scoff at him as old-fashioned." -- Michael Feingold, The Village Voice (June 2004)

"The stage is fundamental pretense and it thrives on the aceptance of that fact and in multiplication of additional pretenses.  When it tries to assert that the personages in the action 'really are,' really inhabit such and such rooms, really suffer such and such emotions, it loses rather than gains credibility." -- Thornton Wilder, "Some Thoughts on Playwriting" (1941).

"In 1931 Wilder published The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act. Three of the plays, "The Long Christmas Dinner, "Pullman Car Hiawatha," and "The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden," were perhaps the most theatrically experimental written to that time by an American." -- HarperAcademic.com