Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

In my experience, plays that start with a theme the playwright wants to explore rarely work. The impulse to explore a theme is more naturally the province of the essay, and indeed plays that are theme-based tend to feature extended essay-like passages in which the writer toys with ideas rather than deal with choices characters make. Which is the problem. Plays are pretty much about the choices characters make.

Thornton Wilder shifted between plays primarily about people and plays primarily about ideas. The ones in which people have the upper hand – Our Town and The Matchmaker – move you to tears and laughter. The short plays based in themes and conceits – Pullman Car Hiawatha and The Long Christmas Dinner – beguile and divert and don’t overstay their welcomes. I have found his long plays based in themes and conceits problematic.

The Skin of Our Teeth, for one, never quite landed for me. To my taste, Wilder is too self-consciously cute here, kicking at the dirt in an aw-shucks manner while slipping in his serious intentions with a wink. Mine is not a universal opinion. Both Edward Albee and Lanford Wilson spoke of their admiration for it, and Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green began working on a musical version, which suggests their regard. (Their song, “Here Comes the Sun” survives and is wonderful.) As it happened, I thought the recent musical version by Ethan Lipton, The Seat of Our Pants, was a substantial improvement on the play, cutting back the forced whimsy and self-importance and adding a beguiling score.

The Emporium is another one of his plays that tries to address serious themes by way of a fanciful conceit. A young man — an orphan named John — arrives in the city and very much wishes to be employed by the Emporium, a magical department store of uncharted dimensions that seems to have everything in stock. It’s not a pure Wilder work. A playwright named Kirk Lynn found pages of scenes and notes of an unfinished play in a Yale library and (with the permission of the Wilder estate) added material he hopes matches Wilder’s tones and intentions to come up with a finished work. It consistently held my interest and frequently delighted me.

But Lynn has added a passage in which he guesses that Wilder intended the desire to work in the Emporium to be a desire to lead a life in the arts. And that doesn’t quite work for me. A department store is about sales, and is the life of an artist about sales? I’ve always thought of it as being about creation. A store sells what others create. Surely Wilder wasn’t trying to come up with a metaphor for an agency. The metaphor doesn’t strike me as apt or persuasive. (And nowhere in the play do we see any of the Emporium’s goods or a customer.)

What’s more, except for a gallery of funny, larger-than-life figures played by scene-stealer Candy Buckley (who, in an earlier age, would have been a star at Upstairs at the Downstairs), the characters struck me as wispy, without strong motivations, so there rarely was any sense of much in contest in the scenes.

Another “but.” But I was glad to see it. Decades before off-off-Broadway writers made a habit of foolhardy experiments and uninhibited fancy, Wilder was taking big swings. He was pioneering absurdism before the term came into popular use. Whatever the Wilder estate deems worthy of offering in his name, count me as eager to be in the audience.