The Matchmaker - Center Stage

Why Farce?
Farce is a genre
that gets a bad rap,
and you can see why. Its scenes are a crazy
quilt of slamming doors, men hiding in
closets, and constant cross-dressing. To
a disapproving eye, the form is shallow;
to a puritanical one, it’s positively
pornographic. And yet, for the dramatic
frame of The Merchant of Yonkers—written
mere months after Our Town premiered
on Broadway—Thornton Wilder rejected
the famously unadorned stage that had
surprised and charmed audiences in his
previous triumph, choosing instead to
play within the sandbox of this gleefully
lowbrow, vigorously knockabout genre. Why
would Wilder forsake the poetic heights of
Our Town’s final act, a graveyard scene that
brilliantly distills the eternity of the cosmos,
for the quotidian bluster of farce? And in
Yonkers, of all places!
Farce’s low reputation may also stem from
its plainspoken ability to appeal throughout
the ages to audiences of all kinds—
precisely the qualities that Wilder admired
and sought to recreate. Its golden ages tend
to accompany eras in which the little man
attains a sense of self, and its artistic homes
have traditionally been of the low-rent
variety. Never was this truer than in the 19 th
and early 20 th Centuries—the period from
which Wilder draws the sources and setting
of The Merchant of Yonkers, which would
become The Matchmaker.
In the Paris of Feydeau and Labiche, the
Vienna of Raimund and Nestroy, or the
flickering silent films of Buster Keaton and
Charlie Chaplin, the little man occupied
the center of the frame, in the midst of a
relentlessly moving, stimulatingly chaotic
world. It was an increasingly industrial
age, and the form consequently became
mechanized. A good farce began to
resemble a dramaturgical dynamo—an
energy generator of reversals in action
that hurtles ever faster toward a pleasingly
inevitable catastrophe.
by Drew Lichtenberg, Associate Dramaturg
In The Matchmaker, Thornton Wilder
preserves farce’s social reach and inherent
vigor, but he was wary of its mechanical
imperative. As he writes in an illuminating
essay, Noting the Nature of Farce, the
genre’s twin drives toward “logic and
objectivity” leave no room for the human.
“A ‘pure’ farce would be all pattern and
would admit no mixture,” and it would
“dare not lean too far toward the exposition
of character.” Uninterested in building
robots, Wilder characteristically retains
the unpretentious style of Our Town,
and its cast of ordinary Americans, and
revs up the comic engine. As a result, The
Matchmaker, for all its brazen swagger,
contains emotional truths just as rich and
resonant as those in his previous work.
Everyone recognizes Cornelius’s youthful
elation when he describes the fascinating
woman he’s just met, or can empathize
with older characters who still yearn for
some sensation with their sensibility.
“My play is about the aspirations of the
young (and not only the young) for a fuller,
freer participation in life,” Wilder wrote of
The Matchmaker in the 1956 preface to his
Three Plays, concluding with an extended
comparison between his creation and
Johann Nestroy’s original text:
Imagine an Austrian pharmacist
going to the shelf to draw from
a bottle which he knows to
contain a stinging corrosive liquid,
guaranteed to remove warts and
wens; and imagine his surprise
when he discovers that it has been
filled overnight with very American
birch-bark beer.
Wilder’s treatment is an altogether
different chemical composition—modeled
on its forebear but infused with the
vitality of the New World, as sweet as
it is sharp.
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