What are the differences between Merchant and Matchmaker? In production, they came down largely to directorial interpretation. Guthrie’s Matchmaker was resplendent with colorful and playful costumes and scenery. Reinhardt’s Merchant had featured purples and period-piece furnishings. Guthrie’s vision of the play and Gordon’s interpretation of Dolly Levi stood in sharp contrast to Reinhardt’s more classical vision of how to mount farce and Jane Cowl’s “great lady” performance. “This malevolent pixie,” wrote the redoubtable Kenneth Tynan of Ruth Gordon’s performance at the time of the London opening, “flies at the part like a bat out of hell”—and he and audiences loved her for it.

What of the two scripts? In letters written to his dramatic agent and attorney in July 1954 from rehearsals in London, Wilder described The Matchmaker as “extensively rewritten.” But only three months later he saw it differently. On October 7, 1954, with the play approaching its London opening, he wrote his agent, “The wastepaper baskets of Europe are full of my rewriting.” To clarify:

Now here’s the point of this letter—in all this rewriting what has happened is that the text has got back closer and closer to THE MERCHANT OF YONKERS. And that’s natural: what I wrote in Arizona in 1938 was written when I had nothing else on my mind except THE MERCHANT. Now we change and change and finally it becomes clear that the original form was best. So when it’s finally published or released . . . it will be evident to all that THE MATCHMAKER is merely a cut, trimmed, original, touched up YONKERS.

Wilder’s view of the few differences between the two plays notwithstanding, the changes in The Matchmaker were significant enough to merit a new copyright. The two works were produced sixteen years apart with a depression and a war falling in between, so it is no surprise that we encounter different Americas and Americans in Merchant and Matchmaker. Two examples illustrate significant differences in language, tone, and staging. The first comes from Dolly Levi’s soliloquy in Act IV. The Great Depression still had the country by the throat in 1938, with a host of schemes for collective political solutions in the wings. In what is all but a classroom lecture, Dolly addresses the audience in Act IV of Merchant:

And the first sign that a person’s refused the human race is that he makes plans to improve and restrict the human race according to patterns of his own.

It looks like love of the human race, but believe me, it’s the refusal of the human race—those blueprint worlds where everyone is supposed to be happy, and no one’s allowed to be free.

In The Matchmaker of 1954, Dolly warns of the dangers of too much (or too little) money. But gone is the lecture. Instead, her speech is all but an aria of a lonely person (“a perfectly good oak leaf—but without color and without life”) eager to rejoin the human race. And the comment about money—arguably the play’s most famous line—now appears as: “Money, I’ve always felt, money—pardon my expression—is like manure; it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread about encouraging young things to grow.”