The Matchmaker

Contents

Introduction

Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker is that rarest of birds: a virtually perfect stage comedy. Indeed, along with Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page and Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You, it is one of the three or four greatest American comedies of the twentieth century.

Successfully creating timeless comedy for the stage is an art of enormous rarity. Shakespeare and Shaw managed it over ten times each. After that, the roll call includes Farquhar, Goldsmith, Sheridan, O’Keeffe, A. W. Pinero, Wilde, and Coward. And among that number we can count Wilder’s The Matchmaker.

The play started life with a different title, The Merchant of Yonkers, and when it opened on Broadway in 1938, directed by the famous Max Reinhardt, it failed with the critics and closed quickly. Then, sixteen years later, something remarkable happened: the play reopened in a slightly altered version with a new director and cast, and it was a triumph, traveling from the Edinburgh Festival to London, then back to New York in a resurrection of a scope heretofore known only to the Christian religion, and certainly unprecedented in the history of Broadway. It is a testament not only to Wilder’s faith in the play but also to the quality of the play itself.

So how did Wilder do it? How did he write this mini miracle of construction, high spirits, and emotional wallop? I’ve spent a great deal of my writing life thinking about the structure and content of stage comedy in the English language, from Twelfth Night to One Man, Two Guvnors, and I’ve concluded that in order to write a good one, you need four ingredients: a strong premise, a solid structure, wit, and resonance. The Matchmaker has all of these in abundance.

As for premise, The Matchmaker has not one but two strong story lines. The first is about two country mice who escape to the big city for a day of adventure. The mice in question, Cornelius Hackl and Barnaby Tucker, are clerks in a dry goods store in the small town of Yonkers, New York, in the early 1880s. When their employer, Horace Vandergelder, tells them he’ll be away for the day, they resolve to spend that day living large in New York City so that they’ll have a past to remember in the years ahead. In the end, the day of adventure changes their lives forever.

The second story concerns a middle-aged heroine named Dolly Levi who yearns for a second chance at life. She gets it by coming to terms with the memory of her late husband, then marrying a lovable curmudgeon, Horace Vandergelder, who can give her something to look forward to.

Wilder based the first of these plots on a comedy titled Einen Jux will er sich machen, written in 1842 by the popular Viennese playwright Johann Nestroy. Comedy, even more than tragedy and melodrama, seems to require a strong premise, and the greatest playwrights have often looked backwards, seeking plots in the works of their literary forebears. Shakespeare was the master of borrowed plots, and Wilder did it several times in his career.