In 1938, Thornton Wilder’s THE MERCHANT OF YONKERS opened on Broadway. Wilder was widely known and acclaimed, and had just that year received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play OUR TOWN. But THE MERCHANT OF YONKERS, an adaptation of a century-old Austrian play, received mixed reviews. The New York Times opined that “Mr. Wilder’s prank is not for people whose minds are unendingly adult,” and THE MERCHANT OF YONKERS closed after only 39 performances.
The following year, Wilder wrote an essay for The New York Times in which he defended the form of farce. “Farce would seem to be intended for childlike minds still touched with grossness; but the history of the theater shows us that the opposite is true. Farce has always flourished in ages of refinement and great cultural activity.” Wilder argued that “farce is based on logic and objectivity,” storytelling that allows a single ridiculous premise in a world that otherwise follows familiar and logical patterns.
Fifteen years after its premiere, when director Tyrone Guthrie expressed interest in reworking THE MERCHANT OF YONKERS (which is itself a reworking of an Austrian classic by the famous actor/playwright Johann Nestroy – EINEN JUX WILLER SICHMACHEN, 1842 – who himself had adapted a little-known English comedy by John Oxenford , A DAYWELLSPENT1835), a farce in four acts still seemed a risky choice. Would its audience appreciate the comedy, or would it feel silly or simple? Critics and theatergoers considered farce a quaint form, even calling it “obsolete,” but Wilder accepted the challenge. He reworked the play extensively—what he called “minor revisions”—and rechristened it THE MATCHMAKER.
In its revised form, THE MATCHMAKER was a critical and popular success. It played in Edinburgh and London before returning to New York, where it opened on December 1955 and ran for over a year. Star Ruth Gordon was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in the title role, and Guthrie won the Best Director Tony Award for his work. THE MATCHMAKER’S success certainly helped farce’s reputation and appeal to modern audiences. The play enjoyed even further success when it was adapted into the iconic 1964 musical HELLO, DOLLY!.
Set in the 1880’s, 1HE MATCHMAKER has the pell-mell tumble of the classic farce as well as many of its time honored trappings: hiding under tables and in cupboards; overhearing behind screens; chases; mistaken identity; trap doors; and so on. But a farce needs do no more than provide an evening’s entertainment, and Wilder’s play goes well beyond that No writer of his time has been more uniformly concerned with moral issues; none is less didactic. Didacticism he has branded as “coercion”. “Beauty is the only persuasion,” he says.
Nearly sixty years after its premiere, THE MATCHMAKER remains relevant and relatable. Wilder’s play is a skillful and entertaining farce, but it also contains a deeper and more meaningful core. Despite its over-the-top comedy, it is at heart a story of finding love amid the distractions and complications of modern life. It is light and humorous, but at the same time unafraid to deal with larger and more serious themes—including the meanings of virtue and vice, life and death, and safety and risk.
After years as a merchant in Yonkers, widower Horace Vandergelder finally has the time and money to take a new wife. He has sacrificed his personal life in order to attend to the demands of his business, a story that will certainly have a familiar ring to a contemporary audience. In today’s fast-paced technological world, it is easy to be preoccupied with work and busy daily routines. Like Vandergelder and THE MATCHMAKER’s other characters, we often only accidentally—and even comically—stumble upon our life’s most treasured passions.
It takes the matchmaker Dolly Levi to teach Vandergelder to look past matters of money and business. She encourages him to focus instead on relationships with his fellow human beings. Vandergelder maintains that he would be a fool not to think first of acquiring money, but Dolly shows him that he “must decide whether he’ll live…a fool among fools or a fool alone.” As today’s theatergoers must be reminded to power off their cell phones before the performance, temporarily stemming the flow of work-related emails in order to share the experience of an evening at the theater, Dolly’s words have a special resonance.
These sentiments elevate Wilder’s work beyond a simple farce, questioning the reliability of those theater critics who dismissed THE MERCHANT OF YONKERS as a “prank.” Audiences continue to respond to THE MATCHMAKER both because of its comedy and because of the truths it reveals about life—whether in the late-nineteenth-century setting of the action, the 1950s of the play’s first production, or here at tonight’s performance.
On the 100th anniversary of Wilder’s birthday in 1997, The New York Times published an article about the playwright and his legacy. On that occasion, the same newspaper that both disparaged THE MERCHANT OF YONKERS and published Wilder’s defense of farce wrote, “Like Wilde or Chekhov or Shaw, he [Wilder] was essentially a moralist. Each of these playwrights could dramatize ideas and conduct; could make us think about our feelings. They sought their different ways, to clarify life by portraying its contradictions. Wilder took the given and raised it to the higher power of reflection. And he did it the hard way: by telling the truth.” In THE MATCHMAKER, Wilder uses Vandergelder’s tale to highlight our own experiences with the complexity of life and love.
As a final note, here are some thoughts by Sir Tyrone Guthrie, director of the original production of THE MATCHMAKER:
“Just as in OUR TOWN and THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH, so the audience at THE MATCHMAKER is not asked to believe it self any· where but at the theatre. The author uses the mechanism of the theatre not to create illusion but as a constant reminder that the theatre is a symbol of Life. The stage is the world. The characters are not merely themselves, but representatives of humanity. The elaborate and preposterous plot derives not from life, which it only faintly resembles, but from the theatre. The background of OUR TOWN is the bare stage of a theatre during a rehearsal and the action is interpreted to the audience by a commentator who is described as the Stage Manager. In THE MATCHMAKER the stage is gaily dressed and lighted up in the style that was familiar to our grandparents; and the comment upon the actors is made by the characters themselves in the form of asides to the audience. In both plays, and in 1HE SKIN OF OUR TEEIH as well, there is no attempt that the goings on are really taking place, that the audience is anything but a group of people that have assembled not passively to accept an illusion, but actively to take part in a game of make-believe. This is the assumption behind all Wilder’s work in the theatre; and this is what I. particularly like and admire.”
And for us at TACT it is precisely this active “game of make believe!’ that we feel makes the theatrical experience unique; and it’s what we particularly like and admire, too.
