As for the element of wit, The Matchmaker abounds in verbal virtuosity on every page. Five lines after Vandergelder’s opening gambit, Joe the barber says, “Mr. Vandergelder, will you please sit still one minute? If I cut your throat it’ll be practically unintentional.” Four pages later, Wilder layers two great lines on top of each other:

VANDERGELDER:

A man’s not worth a cent until he’s forty. We just pay ’em wages to make mistakes—don’t we, Joe?

JOE:

You almost lost an ear on it, Mr. Vandergelder.

In his first soliloquy, Vandergelder opines: “Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she’s a householder.” And my favorite of all is in Act Three when an apoplectic Vandergelder hires the Cabman to try to stop his niece Ermengarde from eloping with her boyfriend. The Cabman responds calmly: “Oh I know them, sir. They’ll win in the end. Rivers don’t run uphill.”

Here, in just four words, Wilder tells us all we need to know about the unstoppable determination of love and youth. “Rivers don’t run uphill.” It reminds me of the beauty of Puck’s lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when the lovers finally, inevitably, come together: “Jack shall have Jill, / Naught shall go ill, / The man shall have his mare again and all shall be well.”

As for the resonance of the play, it has the ping of a Stradivarius in the way all great plays do, by a sort of alchemy made up of all the right elements. It’s concise, it’s specific, it’s universal, it’s observant, it’s entertaining, it’s sparkling, it’s challenging, and it’s reassuring, all at once. It is set in a time and place where we’d all like to live, and the very names of the characters evoke the spirit of the play: Cornelius Hackl, Barnaby Tucker, Ermengarde, Ernestina Simple, Minnie Fay. These are fairytale names with a knowing smile.

Wilder has a lot to say in The Matchmaker and his serious themes are woven seamlessly into the farcical horseplay. The value of money to cure social ills is a theme that Dolly herself expands on several times in the play. Another theme, as Wilder describes it, is “the aspiration of human beings” for a “fuller, freer participation in life.” Young Barnaby sums up this key theme at the end of the play with disarming simplicity when he addresses the audience directly and says: “We all hope that in your lives you have just the right amount of sitting quietly at home, and just the right amount of . . . adventure. Goodnight!”

Wilder was wary of imposing themes too explicitly in his plays and he admired Shakespeare above all other playwrights for being profound without grinding axes. In an interview with The Paris Review, he said:

[A]ll the great dramatists, except the very greatest one, have precisely employed the stage to convey a moral or religious point of view concerning the action. The theater is supremely fitted to say: “Behold! These things are.” Yet most dramatists employ it to say: “This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.” . . . Only in Shakespeare are we free of hearing axes grind.