The Merchant of Yonkers premiered at Boston’s Colonial Theatre on December 12, 1938. It faced a critical establishment walking on eggshells from having embarrassed itself by negatively misjudging and almost derailing Our Town on its path to Broadway less than a year earlier. While scribes found plenty to criticize, especially the play’s pace (too slow), its length (too long), and the fact that many a line still had to be learned, they were determined to find the glass at least half full. The Boston Globe reported it “hilariously successful in places,” and the Christian Science Monitor saw “an imaginative warmth that is rare in the theater.”

Any hope that Wilder would have a third Broadway hit in two years (his adaptation of A Doll’s House in 1937 and Our Town being the other two) died the morning after Merchant opened on December 28 at Broadway’s Guild Theatre. Some New York reviews were kind, but the burden of opinion spelled debacle. John Anderson wrote brutally in the New York Journal-American: “When a farce isn’t funny, there is nothing to be done.” Other reactions around town were that the play was “dull,” “overly arch and tedious,” “drugged boredom,” possessed “little dexterity or finesse,” and proved a “depressing spectacle.” Jane Cowl was either panned for her performance or pitied for being associated with such a play. In addition to damning the production, several critics questioned the viability of the entire enterprise: “What in the name of God made a writer as exalted as Thornton Wilder think that it was important for him to wrench himself into the past to the extent of reviving a farce from the Vienna of 1842,” wrote the unhappy Robert Benchley in The New Yorker.

Was Merchant fatally flawed? Wilder’s close friend, the feisty critic and radio commentator Alexander Woollcott, to whom Wilder had dedicated Our Town, was confident the play was sound. He laid its failure at Reinhardt’s door, accusing him of wrecking it with “heavy-handed” directing and poor casting. (Rumor has it that he came close to physically assaulting Reinhardt over the offense.) Even before it closed on Broadway Woollcott predicted to Wilder that the play would be successfully revived in a few years “in the American idiom.” Students of Wilder and the play have echoed Woollcott’s view ever since. Donald Haberman in his valuable work The Plays of Thornton Wilder: A Critical Study stated it this way:

Reinhardt was expert at directing Nestroy’s kind of play for German audiences, but he seemed to understand neither Wilder’s play nor the American crowd. His reputation depended on his creating style through elaborate stage effects and slow pace. . . . Wilder’s play is not a period piece. To emphasize its time and place through visual effects is to destroy its immediacy, which is established in part by the deliberate removal of all marks of any particular culture.

Wilder never shared this view completely. He believed that events of the time—the Depression and war jitters—rather than the production alone, played a significant role in the play’s failure, and when the script was published in April 1939, he did not hesitate to dedicate it to Reinhardt with “deep admiration and indebtedness.” Wilder’s view was not a product of reflection after the carnage; the second day into the play’s doomed run, he wrote his attorney: “It’s all been worth it. The things that I’ve learned about playwriting; the association with Reinhardt; the gradual improvement of the text of this play which in its revival (1948) will be a nifty.” And five years later, in September 1943, from his post with Air Force Intelligence in North Africa, the now Major Thornton Wilder wrote his sister regarding the ongoing interest in his farce: “I wish I were there to cut the play, and rebuild portions of it. Reviewing it in my memory. And started re-admiring Reinhardt so that I almost signed up with him again.”