If you don’t like that, how about: THE GREEN SHOOTS or JOIN HANDS. Oh, dear—I want one that expresses the ‘spring’ out of bondage. The right to enjoyment. Isn’t title-hunting tormenting?

Readers will recognize that the playwright’s second and third title choices spring directly from his statement in the Preface to Three Plays that the play is about “the aspirations of the young (and not only of the young) for a fuller, freer participation in life.”

It would be a mistake to say that the relaunching of Merchant / Matchmaker was a cakewalk. Frayed nerves, tantrums, long nights devoted to rewriting and pruning and cutting, and the fear of impending disaster are all part of the play’s story in Scotland and England. But Ruth Gordon and Tyrone Guthrie’s instincts proved correct. The play Wilder called an “ugly duckling” opened on August 16, 1954, in the Theatre Royal in Newcastle-upon-Tyne for a six-performance “provincial city” tryout before its official debut at the Edinburgh Festival—and came away a swan. “It is a long time since there was a first night in Newcastle which pleased its audience to such a degree,” wrote a reviewer. The show, even in this large theater, was a sellout by the third performance.

The Matchmaker did encounter a few harsh notices, typically from lordly big-city critics not fond of farce, and a few admonitions about tempo, timing, length, or the performance of a given actor. But starting in Newcastle, and going on to sixteen performances in Edinburgh, then to another ten weeks that fall in several additional provincial cities—even a dash to participate in another festival in Berlin—the production achieved success on an ever-larger and more glorious canvas. A sampling of praise gives the picture: the play was called “glittering” and “glowing,” “frisky” and “sparkling,” “like planting a telephone pole, and seeing it burst into leaves and chestnut candles.” The London opening on November 4, 1954, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket—“charming,” “delicious and elegant,” “abounding high spirits”—was all but an anticlimax for this now field-tested, finely tuned farce. And give or take the few requisite moments of fear, panic, and temper, the story repeated itself later in the United States where, after two more fine-tunings in Philadelphia and Boston (now coproduced by David Merrick and The Theatre Guild), The Matchmaker commenced its “nifty” Broadway revival and run on December 5, 1955, with most of its original cast. Wilder was in Rome but the telegram he received the next morning from his dramatic agent, Harold Freedman, left no doubt about what had occurred at the Royale Theater on Forty-Fifth Street:

AUDIENCE RECEPTION WONDERFUL [stop] NOTICES WONDERFUL [stop] LINE AT BOX OFFICE BEST HAROLD

Putting aside all questions of casting and rehearsal time, The Matchmaker was simply a different experience from The Merchant of Yonkers. The legendary stage publicist Richard Maney, who had handled the 1938 production, put the issue this way in 1957: “As played by Cowl and directed by Reinhardt, The Merchant of Yonkers was a roguish lark. Guthrie and Miss Gordon reduced it to bawdy slapstick.” “Reduced” has negative connotations but what is clear is that slapstick “played” in 1954. New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson, a Wilder champion, felt compelled to write in 1938 about the play’s “heavy feet.” From London sixteen years later, he wrote enthusiastically about an event that “is broad and funny and seems a good deal more modern in spirit than machine-made goods like ‘Anniversary Waltz’ and ‘The Tender Trap.’” Later, in New York, he would write admiringly of the play’s “loud, vulgar, slapdash and uproarious” character. Did critics compare Matchmaker to Merchant? Theatre Annual phrased it this way: “[The Matchmaker]now careened where it once clattered and where it once sputtered, here exploded sky high.”