He distrusts the young, but he also has no respect for the law. He parts with cash sparingly, a few dollars here and there, but he carries a huge amount in his purse, which he is surprisingly careless enough to lose. In short, he is a compilation of unpleasant human traits, which would make him a fine secondary character. As the lead, he serves to remind audiences of the extremist nature of comic characters. Putting Horace Vandergelder in the middle of the play is like focusing a movie camera so tightly on a science-fiction monster that a zipper in the back of the suit eventually shows.

The play’s other main character, Dolly Levi, is just as artificial, but in the other direction: she is too good, too knowing, to be from the world ordinary humans inhabit. Her chosen mission as a ‘‘woman who arranges things’’ comes with supernatural powers. She can tell the two young lovers to go to a certain restaurant at a certain time, and everything will come out all right for them. She can tell outrageous stories, such as the one about Vandergelder’s clerk being an undercover millionaire, and have them accepted if not quite believed. The only way audiences can accept Dolly’s abilities is by distancing the world onstage from their own and accepting that things happen there that could never happen here.

Wilder uses other theatrical conventions, or, rather, overuses them, to keep his comedy at arm’s length. Inside the box set, people do not realize that a character wearing a woman’s coat and a veil could be a man. They do not hear what is being said on the other side of a screen. They find men hiding in cupboards and under tables, and the proper response is to walk away in a jealous snit. These stage conventions make theatrical sense, because they allow the playwright to put different characters onstage and move them in and out without having to constantly change sets; and they are funny, too, drawing from the human capacity to be fooled. They are exactly what is to be expected from a comedy that means to be there just to make people laugh. At the same time that they chide the characters for their intellectual nearsightedness, though, they openly mock the play for having wandered so far from meaningfulness.

Whenever audiences come close to accepting the world onstage as its own separate place, with its own physical, psychological, and moral rules, Wilder reminds them, through the use of soliloquies, that the actors are present in a common reality after all. When it works, the objectified theater does so by presenting events for audiences to scrutinize like grasshoppers in a jar. The open area facing the audience is referred to as ‘‘the fourth wall,’’ an invisible barrier between the two worlds. Soliloquies break that fourth wall. When characters step out into the footlights to talk to the audiences directly, the spell of watching a separate reality is broken. This technique comes up just a little short of having actors introduce themselves and announce that they know they are just people in makeup pretending to be other people who never existed. Audiences made aware of theater’s artifice experience the feeling that Wilder describes in his preface, that modern theater has ‘‘shut the play off in a museum showcase.’’

Having determined Wilder’s intention to satirize modern theater and examined some of the methods he used to do this, the question that then arises is how effective is he at making audiences reconsider comedies. The answer is almost certainly different for today’s audiences than it was for those who saw the play in its first run. At that time, it was rare for a Broadway playwright to take an ironic look at his material, which is why Wilder seemed to feel that doing so was necessary. He wanted his audiences to become aware of what is happening to them when they are in the presence of a play, and to do that he had to draw attention to technique. Today, however, irony is done to death. Comedians give hammy exaggerations of what it is like to be a comedian; serious artists scrutinize advertising art; television shows are about people making television shows, with the interior show being the sort of static product that Wilder sought to lampoon. The Matchmaker satirized how modern culture flattens the realness of the theatrical experience, but modern culture has absorbed Wilder’s satiric method and for the last forty years has been joyously satirizing itself. With so much irony going around, the earliest attempt looks primitive.

One more aspect to the weakening of The Matchmaker’s satiric strength is that it was turned into the sort of consumer-friendly, ‘‘soothing’’ entertainment product that it was supposed to unmask, as the musical Hello, Dolly! Musicals in general are meant to entertain, not to provoke thought; musical adaptations usually end up cutting out any challenging ideas to make room for songs. Because the world of musical theater is, by its nature, farcical (audiences are not supposed to really think that a band just suddenly appeared and that everyone improvised lyrics and dance steps in unison), any satiric sense is lost.

Why should Hello, Dolly! influence how people interpret the ironic stance of The Matchmaker? It shouldn’t, but it does. Hello, Dolly! was the more popular of the two, with a title song that has become a standard of pop music. When The Matchmaker is mentioned, you can count the seconds until someone mentions that it was the basis for Hello, Dolly!, with as much certainty as counting the seconds between a lightning flash and thunder. If the satiric element of The Matchmaker had been stronger, it could stand alone, as the nasty little piece that was declawed and made into a feel-good musical. But the satire is actually so quiet that it has to be explained, and so it is often missed.

The problem with satirizing pop art is that one is halfway into the pop art world already, and it is easy to be accepted by the mainstream. Songs by the Who and Janis Joplin, once emblems of the counterculture, are catchy enough to use in car ads, if the lyrics are left out. ‘‘Born in the U.S.A.,’’ an angry song about betrayal and disappointment, is found suitable background music for political rallies if no one listens to anything it says besides the title and refrain. And The Matchmaker, which Wilder meant as an examination of theatrical conventions, reads like just another comedy of manners today, because modern audiences are more accustomed to satire that is sharper and more obvious.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on The Matchmaker, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

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 successful run the following November 4. In October, 1955, it was brought to Philadelphia, where it also succeeded; and when taken to New York, it engaged a run long enough to win ‘‘hit’’ status.

The Matchmaker doesn’t differ materially from The Merchant of Yonkers; and it belongs, therefore, with the work of this earlier period of Wilder’s career rather than with that after World War II. As Harold Clurman pointed out in his review of The Matchmaker, the failure of the earlier version and the success of the latter were probably owing to the difference in directors. The Merchant was directed by Max Reinhardt, for whom Wilder wrote it; and it failed, probably, because of what Clurman called the director’s ‘‘unfamiliarity with American theatre custom.’’ The Matchmaker was directed by Tyrone Guthrie, who by common critical consent kept the action moving at the rapid pace it requires.

Wilder took much of the material for this play from Johann Nestroy’s Einen Jux will er sich Machen (Vienna, 1842). He calls it a ‘‘free adaptation’’ of Nestroy’s play, which was in turn based upon A Day Well Spent (London, 1835) by John Oxenham. ‘‘One way to shake off the nonsense of the nineteenth- century staging is to make fun of it,’’ he wrote in the preface to Three Plays. ‘‘This play parodies the stock-company plays that I used to see at Ye Liberty Theatre, Oakland, California, when I was a boy.’’ Much of its humor arises from the use of such old comic stage devices as mistaken identity, quick leaps for hiding places under tables, characters dressed in clothes of the opposite sex, and people caught in folding screens. It features stock characters and absurd situations that develop into a conventional complicated plot. It has a ‘‘villain,’’ for instance, in the merchant Vandergelder, who tries to prevent the marriage of a young couple— his niece Ermengarde and the impecunious young artist Ambrose Kemper.

The action takes place in Yonkers during the 1880’s and involves the efforts of the principal characters, whose enjoyment of life is in one way or another dependent upon Vandergelder, to ‘‘participate’’ in life. In addition to Ermengarde and Ambrose, the main characters include Vandergelder’s two clerks, Cornelius and Barnaby, who go to New York in search of ‘‘adventure,’’ and Dolly Levi, the ‘‘Matchmaker,’’ who pretends to make a match for Vandergelder with a young, attractive woman (Irene Molloy) but actually makes it for herself. Vandergelder’s ‘‘sensible’’ behavior and values are the obstacles in each instance to their free enjoyment of life, and the plot consists in the attempts of these people to combat his life-denying conventionality. His most formidable antagonist is Dolly Levi, who is the arranger, the artist of life who follows no doctrine except that of the full enjoyment of it and opposition to the conventional theories of ‘‘success’’ held by Vandergelder to whom work and money are life’s highest values. She frankly and simply wants to marry him for his money, but her ideas about wealth are in direct opposition to his. She is determined to put Vandergelder’s coins into circulation so they can free others from habit, convention, and isolation—for the enjoyment of life. She explains her economic philosophy to Ambrose: ‘‘Money should circulate like rain water. It should be flowing down among the people, through dressmakers and restaurants and cabmen, setting up a little business here, and furnishing a good time there.’’

When she has conquered Vandergelder, his unconditional surrender contains assurances that his money will be spent instead of saved. Vandergelder is ‘‘sound’’ from the standpoint of conventional social values; for he has saved, worked hard, and been cautious. He is the stolid, pompous ‘‘selfmade’’ man who equates the acquisition of riches and the exploitation of others with virtue and ‘‘good sense.’’ The clever Dolly turns the platitudes he lives by to her own uses in such delicious bits of dialogue as the following:

VANDERGELDER:

Mrs. Molloy, I’ve got some advice to give you about your business.

MRS. LEVI:

Oh, advice from Mr. Vandergelder! The whole city should hear this.

VANDERGELDER:

In the first place, the aim of business is to make a profit.

MRS. MOLLOY:

Is that so?

MRS. LEVI:

I never heard it put so clearly before. Did you hear It?

VANDERGELDER:

You pay those girls of yours too much. You pay them as much as men. Girls like that enjoy their work. Wages, Mrs. Molloy, are paid to make people who do work they don’t enjoy.

MRS. LEVI:

Mr. Vandergelder thinks so ably. And that’s exactly the way his business is run up in Yonkers.

Enjoyment of life requires nurturing of a vice as well as the virtues. The ne’er-do-well Malachi expresses this bit of philosophy: ‘‘There are some people who say you shouldn’t have any weaknesses at all—no vices. But if a man has no vices, he’s in great danger of making vices out of his virtues, and there’s a spectacle. We’ve all seen them: men who were monsters of philanthropy and women who were dragons of purity. We’ve seen people who told the truth, though the Heavens fall—and the Heavens fell. No, no—nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it.’’

The clerks Cornelius and Barnaby are also in rebellion against Vandergelder and what he stands for. Yearning for excitement and resolving to go to New York for an ‘‘adventure,’’ they blow up the tomato cans on the shelves of Vandergelder’s store and leave. They are determined to have a good meal, to be ‘‘in danger,’’ almost to get arrested, to spend all their money (three dollars), and to kiss a girl. Much of the best humor of the play consists in the attempts of these two—and, later, Irene Molloy—to have a part in the excitement of life heretofore denied them by conventions that equate ‘‘adventure’’ with foolishness. It is tender humor, a bit sentimental, even a bit ‘‘heartwarming,’’ but nevertheless very enjoyable. The hilarious scene in Act III, where Dolly twists Vandergelder’s exasperation with her into a hinted proposal, is one of Wilder’s most comical.

It is interesting that while this play first appeared during the depression and featured a conflict between a villainous ‘‘boss’’ and his exploited employees, it was utterly unproletarian; it did not present a ‘‘problem’’ for which social amelioration or reform was needed. The play says in effect that Vandergelder is a moral rather than a social problem. Like Heaven’s My Destination, it proposes that a vigorous, robust spirit of humanism is the answer to materialism: that effective reform should begin with the moral improvement of individuals rather than with legislation. But the play is really too goodnatured to command serious consideration of its humanistic propositions; and perhaps this is one reason it failed in the thirties. Furthermore, it lacks the bite of real satire; and, while there is some ridicule aimed at conventional notions of ‘‘success,’’ the character representing it, Vandergelder, is so candidly, absurdly, and farcically ‘‘bad’’ that the seriousness of what he represents does not become apparent.

There is less claim to serious attention and contemplation in this play than in any of Wilder’s other full-length works; and it should be enjoyed for what it is—a farce. The laughter it evokes at Vandergelder and the conventions he embodies is that of compassion for a fellow human who is unaware of his own foolishness and not that of bitterness or contempt. Wilder often uses the phrase ‘‘makes fun of’’ where ‘‘satirizes’’ might ordinarily be expected. The difference in terminology is relevant, for he seldom satirizes in the sense that he holds persons up to ridicule or scorn. He takes the more gentle way of viewing his people with mild irony, and he achieves a kind of spontaneous gaiety out of his depictions of human folly instead of a laughter of superiority and contempt. The result in The Matchmaker is that one enjoys laughing at Vandergelder’s absurdities but is not constrained to give much thought to their social or ethical significance.

Source: Rex Burbank, ‘‘Three Theatricalist Plays,’’ in Thornton Wilder, Twayne, 1961, pp. 82–111.