The Matchmaker | Three Theatricalist Plays
In the following essay excerpt, Burbank provides a thematic overview of The Matchmaker, finding it belongs to Wilder’s pre-World War II phase, rather than the later period in which it achieved hit status.
The Merchant of Yonkers was a plea for a freer stage and a freer and fuller participation in life. Its first performance was at the Colonial Theatre in Boston on December 12, 1938, a little less than eleven months after the first production of Our Town at Princeton, New Jersey. On December 28, 1938, it opened in New York, where it had a short run of twenty-eight performances. It lay unused until Wilder revised it slightly, changed the title to The Matchmaker, and brought it out again in August, 1954, in Edinburgh. From Edinburgh it went to London, where it began a...
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