Half-New Play in Manhattan

The Matchmaker (by Thornton Wilder) by another name did not smell anything like so sweet. As The Merchant of Yonkers--a rewrite of a century-old Viennese farce--it was pretty much of a flop when produced on Broadway in 1938. But as further rewritten by Playwright Wilder and lustily staged by Tyrone Guthrie, what once merely clattered now careens, what formerly sputtered now explodes.

There is a brazen, often hilarious farcicality about it all. In a production gagged to the teeth, liberty lurches into license, license swaggers into outrageousness, and farce reasserts its ancient claim to a kind of benevolent hoodlumism.

Laid in Yonkers in the '80s, and concerned with a rich, tightfisted old widower in search of a wife, the play tells how a scheming lady matchmaker blows out every match she gets lighted, till she herself manages to become the conquering flame. The story does nothing so genteel as unfold. It catapults and ricochets: characters bounce out of trapdoors, squeeze into closets, hide under tables, eavesdrop behind screens; boys dress up as girls and cab drivers loop with drink, identities are mistaken and purses mislaid. There is all the homey, cheerful pandemonium of a horse-and-buggy age whose inhabitants may have been inhibited but whose playwriting decidedly was not.

British Director Guthrie conducts a brilliant bombardment. In the title role, a bewigged and umbrella'd Ruth Gordon gloriously whacks ar>d wheedles her way to the altar while Loring Smith huffs and bellows, and British Actress Eileen Herlie plays a vivacious widow with bright, broad charm. If sometimes just loud and at other times too cute, The Matchmaker can also, as in a sudden whispered harmonizing of Tenting Tonight, turn warm and sweet. It can even be a little bashfully philosophical. Everyone connives with too much good nature and high spirits for any real claw to lurk beneath such a catcher's mitt of a play. But there are intimations, at least, that mankind is wonderfully foolish and money looms immoderately large; and that for all its caperings and disguises the play does not too wildly misrepresent the human species.

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