Hiding out in the double takes, mistaken identities and reconciliations of The Matchmaker is an unmistakable sense of awe at the human spirit - in particular (but not exclusively) when Wilder is writing about young people. It's this sense of awe that makes the comedy of the piece shine with a special intensity. The Matchmaker affirms the beautiful folly of life and love, while at the same time avoiding sentimentality with a ten-foot pole. It is also about personal and social transformation. It recognizes that we are connected to each other in ways that are not always apparent to us. This view of human interdependency appears throughout Wilder's body of work as well as his view of the theatre. In Hewitt's words, Wilder "recognizes and accepts the fact that theatre is a collaborative art, that director and actors necessarily intervene their bodies, minds, and imaginations between the playwright and his vision of his play."

 

Wilder's humility and wisdom about the theatre are evident not only in his journals and letters but also in the complex history of The Matchmaker's development from its initial ill-fated 1938 production as The Merchant of Yonkers to the revised and re-titled 1954 version. The ingenious contributions of Wilder's collaborators are very much in evidence in the prompt script of Tyrone Guthrie's legendary 1954 production of The Matchmaker. It points to a depth of complicity between writer, director, designer and acting company that I always strive for in my work. The acting edition, based on Guthrie's production, was a principal source of inspiration for me. It gave me a window into Guthrie's inventive proscenium mise-en-scène, as well as into the restless perfectionism of the director and writer. Our production on the Festival's thrust stage is in many ways deeply indebted to and influenced by the genius of its first director.

 

It is because I came to understand just how much consideration and fine tuning the writer did in rehearsal for The Matchmaker that we decided to look at three different versions of the play, ultimately preparing a text that draws from Guthrie's prompt script, the published play and the published edition of The Merchant of Yonkers. I am tremendously grateful to Wilder's nephew and literary executor, Tappan Wilder, for sensitively and graciously allowing us to nose around the three versions of the play in search of further insights and omitted gems. It is with great pleasure that we have been able to re-encounter The Merchant of Yonkers and discover just how much the success of The Matchmaker owes to its initial inception. Who knows why plays don't always work the first time around? Sometimes it's the play, sometimes it's the director, the times, the cast. But more often than not, I think, plays deserve a second chance. The Matchmaker got that second chance, and we are so much the richer for it. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I have.

 

Toqueville remains distressingly current about too many aspects of the American scene, but here, on the subject of theatre, he's wrong for once. Although he can be excused the jibe about America having "no great political catastrophes," as the Civil War is twenty years in the future, he clearly doesn't realize that "people who spend every day in the week in making money" are practically begging Thalia to throw a banana peel under their wingtips. He must not have met on his travels through the young republic the ancestors of David Mamet's Richard Roma in Glengarry Glen Ross or Thornton Wilder's Horace Vandergelder, the title character of The Merchant of Yonkers, the 1938 play Wilder would later revise as The Matchmaker.

 

Apropos of the Merchant-in-vitro, Wilder wrote to Ruth Gordon, the actress whose Dolly Levi would eventually filch the play's title away from Horace: "I've been reading all the great 'formal' comedies in every language: Molière and Goldoni, and Lessing - just to make sure that I've expunged every lurking vestige of what Sam Behrman and George Kaufman think comedy is."

 

S.N. Behrman wrote mild comedies of manners and Kaufman traded in satire. Wilder, typically, is looking beyond the drawing room and the topical headlines that fuelled the work of these commercially successful playwrights in order to drink from the deepest possible dramatic well. (That he could read the three authors he mentions in their original languages is already wildly un-American.) He knew that money has been one of the three comic motivators since the Greeks. To craft his "formal" farce, Wilder hews Horace out of classical bedrock, borrows features from his dramatic sources - plays by Oxenford and Nestroy - and then finishes the surface with the vernacular and values of nineteenth-century American thrift.

 

The first line in the play is a deliberate nod to ancient comic laws:

 

HORACE: (loudly) "I tell you for the hundredth time you will never marry my niece."

 

Horaces always say that; but then the laws of comedy take over and prove them wrong at the end of a single crazy day. An obstacle to love and freedom, blind to his effect on others, Vandergelder is every fiscal conservative who's trod the boards since Euclio in Plautus's Pot of Gold circa 200 BC.

 

Wilder shrewdly keeps Horace in the middle of the socioeconomic scale: a merchant is a more imposing Yankee than a shopkeeper, but he's less than a tycoon. Vandergelder remains in daily physical contact with the source of his livelihood, and he still keeps the books. In America, whose limitless resources and less strictured society made it the Land of Get Rich Quick practically from its discovery, Vandergelder got rich slow. His fortune is the reward of getting up at five in the morning six days a week and shutting the store at ten at night.

 

But this morning is different. Vandergelder has put aside "the last dollar of his first half million" and is looking for a second wife, both to run the house and, he will grudgingly concede, to risk a little romantic foolishness. Should he lose his head in the process, he figures he has enough money to buy it back. Enter Dolly Gallagher Levi: matchmaker and a near relation to Wilder's other brilliant "Stage Manager" characters. She too bears classical lineage. In tragedy, she's the nutrix or nurse figure who tends to purvey catastrophic advice to her mistress. ("Why not tell your stepson, Phaedra, that you're in love with him?" is a shining example.) In commedia dell'arte and its scripted descendants, she is the brainy Colombina, who abets young lovers and thwarts tyrannical fathers.

 

Putatively engaged in finding him a wife, Dolly decides to save Horace for her own good - and, more important, for his own good. When Wilder began writing the play in the mid-1930s, the world was slowly emerging from the Great Depression. Western societies had been flirting - and their literatures flirting more seriously still - with the socialist economic alternative. Though Dolly is a realist who knows that two and two make four, life has endowed her with a suspicious counter-wisdom and a project: letting Horace's wealth flow like "rain water amongst the dressmakers and restaurants and cabmen," with herself as spigot.

 

Dolly's challenge generates a lot of laughter, but Wilder doesn't soothe his audience with the stage bromides that so fatigued his spirit and intellect as a young theatregoer. The Matchmaker does not say that money won't buy happiness. Or that you can live on love. The two younger couples in the play might think so, but Dolly knows better: "Yes, we're all fools and we're all in danger of destroying the world with our folly. But the surest way to keep us out of harm is to give us the four or five human pleasures that are our right in the world - and that takes a little money!"

 

Dolly's pleasure principle is a powerful counterweight to Horace's dour life of Dutch-American industry and thrift. Her campaign to redeem Horace over a chicken dinner at the Harmonia Gardens - served with farcical stage business, reverse psychology and the telling of some hard truths - is the emotional linchpin of the play and a high spot in American comedy. Can Horace be made to dance again? Can he move his feet to the tune of something larger than himself?

 

Productions fail every season for mysterious reasons, and The Merchant of Yonkers flopped loudly in its 1938 première. Was it Max Reinhardt's sluggish direction, or the miscasting of Jane Cowl as Dolly, or general misperception on the part of the critics who weren't expecting an old-fashioned farce from the philosophical playwright who had just given the world Our Town?

 

But, like Horace himself, the play got a second chance. At the invitation of the Stratford Festival's first Artistic Director, Tyrone Guthrie, Wilder came here in the early 1950s and began re-working the play for Ruth Gordon. According to Christopher Plummer and the late Michael Langham, Guthrie sent Wilder to work in the prop shop when he was bored with the writing process. Re-titled The Matchmaker, it was a runaway hit at the Edinburgh Festival in 1954 under Guthrie's quicksilver direction. It quickly transferred first to the West End, then to Broadway in December 1955, where it settled in for a long run before being adapted into the musical Hello, Dolly! in 1964.

 

"Medan agan" reads one of the legends carved on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. It means "nothing in excess" and is one of the touchstones of Greek civilization. The ancient authors decreed that the function of comedy is to correct, through painstaking observation, the excesses of behaviour in the average man. Medan agan. Just enough money. Just enough change. And just, as Barnaby says at play's end, the right amount of adventure. That Dolly and Horace are able to come together as partners is the happiest adventure in the play, whether it's called The Merchant of Yonkers or The Matchmaker.

 

James Magruder is a novelist, translator, theatre scholar, professor and dramaturge.

 

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