The second example is in the play’s final words. Underscoring the principal theme of the play: aspirations of human beings for a “fuller, freer participation in life,” Wilder concludes The Matchmaker by having Mrs. Levi ask Barnaby, the youngest member in the cast, for his opinion about the “moral of the play.” In an increasingly enthusiastic eleven-line send-off commencing, “Oh, I think it’s about . . . I think it’s about adventure,” Barnaby delivers the goods in the form of a personal testimony.

In sharp contrast, The Merchant concludes with a classic farce finale: the cast dances to a happy tune. The stage direction reads: “The company has joined hands in a semi-circle and is singing ‘Old Father Hudson,’ as the curtain falls.”

The music for “Old Father Hudson” was composed for the show by the known team of Jack Green and Rowland V. Haas with lyrics contributed by none other than Thornton Wilder. This long lost piece of Wilder’s artistic record follows:

Some like a mountain side and some like the shore,

Some like their deserts and keep asking for more;

Give me a river, and a hill and a sky;

I’ll take the Hudson; there I’ll live til I die.

Call in the fiddlers three and put wood on blaze,

Snow’s on the Catskills and now short are the days;

Out on the river there is ice on the shore,

All merry Dutchmen start to stamp on the floor.

[REFRAIN]

OLD FATHER HUDSON, roll your waves to ocean!

OLD FATHER HUDSON, roll your waves along!

OLD FATHER HUDSON, roll your waves to ocean!

OLD FATHER HUDSON, roll your waves along!

All merry Dutchmen, living by your waters,

All merry Dutchmen dance and sing this song.

OLD FATHER HUDSON, from Troy to Staten Island,

OLD FATHER HUDSON, roll your waves along!

What were Wilder’s own views of the Guthrie-Gordon revival? He was glad and he was grateful. But the revised play was a learning experience for him, too. As rehearsals began in London, Wilder was temporarily thrown by watching his “happy little farce” subjected to a madcap interpretation. Shortly before the Newcastle opening, his sister wrote of his “agonizing experience” watching Guthrie “overdoing the play & losing it under a circus—the scenery & costumes belong in some other play. Miss G[ordon] is dashing around & screaming & waving her arms to suit herself.” By the London opening, Wilder realized that Gordon’s performance was “glorious” and, as he told his publisher, “made it an entirely new play.” He also believed that the times favored the play. The postwar world was still at sixes and sevens but people were willing to laugh. “The earthquakes of Society have so altered the character of our time,” Wilder thinks [as quoted in a wire story filed from Edinburgh after the opening] “that today comedy is the only means the theatre has to transmit a serious message.” But it was a mark of Wilder’s loyalty to the play’s origins that he “again dedicated” it “to Max Reinhardt with deep admiration and indebtedness.”