At Acting Ensemble on the Avenue
602 E. Mishawaka Avenue in Mishawaka
December 2 at 7:30 pm
StageWorks Staged Reading of:
“The Matchmaker” by Thornton Wilder.
Directed by Philip Schatz
Wilder’s uproarious farce about love and money stars the irrepressible busybody Dolly Gallagher Levi, who inspired the Broadway musical Hello, Dolly! Through Dolly’s subtle machinations, several unlikely couples come together to find happiness in 19th-century New York.
THE STORY: Horace Vandergelder, a wealthy merchant in 19th-century Yonkers, NY, decides to take a wife and employs a matchmaker, Mrs. Dolly Levi. Dolly subsequently becomes involved with two of Vandergelder’s clerks, several lovely ladies, and the headwaiter at an expensive restaurant, where this swift farce runs headlong into hilarious complications. After everyone gets straightened out romantically, Vandergelder finds himself affianced to the astute Dolly Levi herself.
HISTORY: “The Matchmaker” opened on Broadway on December 5, 1955 starring Ruth Gordon (Best Actress, Tony Award nominee), directed by Tyrone Guthrie (Best Director, Tony Award winner). The Matchmaker ran for 486 performances, Wilder’s Broadway record, and closed on February 2, 1957. It was later adapted into the musical Hello, Dolly!.
Thornton Wilder (1897-1975), born in Madison, Wisconsin, and educated at Yale and Princeton, was an accomplished novelist and playwright whose works explore the connection between the commonplace and the cosmic dimensions of human experience. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of his seven novels, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, and his next-to-last novel, The Eighth Day, received the National Book Award (1968). Two of his four major plays garnered Pulitzer Prizes: “Our Town” (1938) and “The Skin of Our Teeth”(1943). His play “The Matchmaker” ran on Broadway for 486 performances (1955-1957), Mr. Wilder’s Broadway record, and was later adapted into the record-breaking musical Hello, Dolly!
Mr. Wilder also enjoyed enormous success with many other forms of the written and spoken word, among them translation, acting, opera librettos, lecturing, teaching and film (his screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 psycho-thriller Shadow of a Doubt remains a classic to this day). Letter writing held a central place in Mr. Wilder’s life, and since his death, three volumes of his letters have been published.
Mr. Wilder’s many honors include the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Book Committee’s Medal for Literature. On April 17, 1997, the centenary of his birth, the US Postal Service unveiled the Thornton Wilder 32-cent stamp in Hamden, Connecticut, his official address after 1930 and where he died on December 7, 1975.
Mr. Wilder continues to be read and performed around the world. Our Town is performed at least once each day somewhere in this country, with Wilder’s other major dramas and shorter plays not far behind. In 2008, “Our Town” and “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” were selected as a joint choice for the NEA’s “Big Read” Program. In recent years Wilder’s works have also inspired a growing number of adaptations, among them an opera based on “Our Town” (music by Ned Rorem, libretto by J.D. McClatchy) and a dramatized version of his novel Theophilus North (Matt Burnett). Reflecting the renewed interest in Mr. Wilder, the Thornton Wilder Society sponsored the first international conference on his works in fall 2008. For more information, visit www.thorntonwilder.com.
“One of the sweetest and smartest romantic farces ever written.” – The Wall Street Journal
“Loud, slap-dash and uproarious… extraordinarily original and funny.” – The New York Times
“Rolls along merrily and madly and the customers are convulsed.” – New York Journal American
“The lines of Wilder are so often brilliant, sage, and witty.” – New York Daily News
“What made Wilder so distinctive among [the] greats of the 20th century was his determination not only to reach out and move people…but rather to offer actual advice for living your life, which is, dear readers, all too brief.” – Chicago Tribune
The Women of Wilder – Breaking Character Annette Storckman, June 4, 2019
