In 1932, Wilder adapted a German translation of the successful, contemporary Hungarian comedy The Bride of Torozko by Ottó Indig. The lively story is set in a small village in Eastern Europe and concerns a spunky young woman who discovers, just before she’s about to be married, that she’s Jewish—and during the course of the play she falls in love with her Jewish roots and out of love with her anti-Semitic fiancé. (Wilder, of mostly Protestant stock, liked to remind people that one of his ancestors was Jewish.)

Sometime before 1939, Wilder was asked by two notable Broadway producers to do an adaptation of a play with another strong storyline, The Beaux’ Stratagem, a late Restoration comedy by George Farquhar. It concerns two down-on-their-luck city bucks who travel to the countryside to find rich wives; and as they travel from town to town, they switch identities as servant and master. Wilder abandoned the adaptation halfway through. Lucky me, a few years ago I was asked by the Wilder estate to finish it, and it has been playing in theaters around the country ever since. Knowing the original Farquhar play and Wilder adaptation as well as I do, I can see with absolute clarity why Wilder agreed to refashion the original play: because the backbone of the story is as strong as an oak. It has just the kind of sturdy, specific plot that a classic comedy needs.

As for the Dolly Levi portion of the plot, it was invented by Wilder from whole cloth. That said, it has strong roots in two traditions of comic drama that Wilder knew well. First, it tips its hat to Molière, particularly in Act One where Dolly tempts Vandergelder with the domestic delights of Ernestina Simple, using dialogue from Molière’s L’Avare. Second, Dolly herself is in the great tradition of comic servants and factotums who save the day, her most obvious forebear being Figaro in The Barber of Seville. Like Figaro, Dolly has a number of skills that she markets with glee (she sells hosiery, gives guitar lessons, reduces varicose veins), and, like Figaro, she arranges marriages. In these homages to Molière and Beaumarchais (and thereby to Plautus and Shakespeare), Wilder acknowledges the debt he owes to the comic tradition that has come before him. As Wilder himself once said: “Literature has always more resembled a torch race than a furious dispute among heirs.”

In one of his typical moments of modesty, Wilder put it this way: “I am not an innovator, but a rediscoverer of forgotten goods.” Well, yes and no. Yes, The Matchmaker is a tip of the hat to the Ye Liberty Playhouse plays of Wilder’s youth; yes, the one-act plays and Our Town owe a debt to Shakespeare, as well as, to a lesser extent, Japanese Noh drama; and yes, as A. R. Gurney has observed, Wilder shared a belief with Sophocles, Shakespeare, and George Bernard Shaw in the ability of the human struggle to circumvent the Olympic order of things. But despite his own statements to the contrary, Wilder wasn’t merely a rediscoverer, he was one of the greatest innovators in the history of American drama.