MRS. LEVI rises, and indicates that he has an announcement to make.

VANDERGELDER:

Barnaby, go in and tell the rest of them that Mrs. Levi has consented—

MRS. LEVI:

Finally consented!

VANDERGELDER:

Finally consented to become my wife.

BARNABY:

Holy cabooses.

Dashes back to the doorway.

Hey! Listen, everybody! Wolf-trap—I mean—Mr. Vandergelder is going to marry Mrs. Levi.

MISS VAN HUYSEN enters followed by all the people in this act. She is now carrying the box of chocolates.

MISS VAN H.:

Dolly, that’s the best news I ever heard.

She addresses the audience.

There isn’t any more coffee; there isn’t any more gingerbread; but there are three couples in my house and they’re all going to get married. And do you know, one of those Ermengardes wasn’t a dear little girl at all—she was a boy! Well, that’s what life is: disappointment, illusion.

MRS. LEVI:

To audience.

There isn’t any more coffee; there isn’t any more gingerbread, and there isn’t any more play—but there is one more thing we have to do. . . . Barnaby, come here.

She whispers to him, pointing to the audience. Then she says to the audience:

I think the youngest person here ought to tell us what the moral of the play is.

BARNABY is reluctantly pushed forward to the footlights.

BARNABY:

Oh, I think it’s about . . . I think it’s about adventure. The test of an adventure is that when you’re in the middle of it, you say to yourself, “Oh, now I’ve got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home.” And the sign that something’s wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure. So that now we all want to thank you for coming tonight, and 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!

MISS VAN HUYSEN has been giving chocolates to the company—she now pops one into BARNABY’S mouth.

THE

CURTAIN

FALLS

Afterword

As Thornton Wilder stated clearly in the text of his play, The Matchmaker is “based upon” Johann Nestroy’s 1842 Viennese satire, Einen Jux will er sich machen (awkwardly translated as “He Wants to Have a Fling”). Nestroy, who is often referred to as the Austrian Shakespeare, was in turn inspired by the English one-act play A Day Well Spent by John Oxenford (1835). Drawing for inspiration on a far more familiar work for English readers, Wilder also spliced into the middle of Act I of The Matchmaker an adapted short scene from Act II, Scene V of Molière’s L’Avare (The Miser). In the scene, Molière’s Frosine, the marriage broker, tries to interest Harpagon in a young woman’s housekeeping and culinary skills, while in Matchmaker, Dolly Levi tries to interest Horace Vandergelder in the similar talents of Ernestina Simple. Thanks to this homage—which Wilder often recounted with glee (describing it by its official name of Contaminatio)—the roots of The Matchmaker can be traced directly to the Roman dramatist Plautus (254–184 BCE) and the dramatist Terence, a Roman of North African descent (185–159 BCE), thus providing a textbook example of the creative process as Wilder expressed it in his well-known Preface to Three Plays. “Literature has always more resembled a torch race than a furious dispute among heirs.”^*