The Matchmaker

Thornton Wilder’s 1954 comedy follows widowed matchmaker Dolly Levi as she arranges romantic encounters in nineteenth-century Yonkers and New York.

Dolly Gallagher Levi: A widowed matchmaker in Thornton Wilder’s play who arranges marriages while seeking a new life for herself. Her matchmaking schemes drive the play, even as she maneuvers toward marriage with Horace Vandergelder.
A Day Well Spent: A farce by John Oxenford, first performed in 1835, about a shopkeeper’s clerks escaping to London. Wilder’s play reworks this farce’s premise of clerks’ city escapades.
Farce: A comic dramatic form built on improbable situations, rapid action, mistaken identities, and physical or verbal confusion. The plot uses farcical escapes and encounters to propel its romantic comedy.
Carol Channing: An American actress and singer who originated the role of Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly! on Broadway. Her performance helped make the character a signature role beyond Wilder’s play.
Horace Vandergelder: A wealthy, tight-fisted merchant who travels to New York seeking a wife in Wilder’s comedy. Dolly redirects his search for a bride toward herself.
John Oxenford: An English playwright and critic whose 1835 farce A Day Well Spent supplied a source for Wilder’s play. His farce provided the plot framework Wilder transformed into a comedy about Dolly.
Dramatic irony: A literary effect in which an audience knows something that one or more characters do not. The audience sees Dolly’s designs while Horace mistakes her interventions for ordinary assistance.
Joseph Anthony: An American theatre and film director who directed the original Broadway production of The Matchmaker and its film adaptation. His staging shaped the play’s first major productions on stage and screen.
Cornelius Hackl: A clerk in Horace Vandergelder’s store who escapes to New York and falls in love with Irene Molloy. His unsanctioned city adventure forms one of Dolly’s arranged romantic encounters.
The Merchant of Yonkers: Thornton Wilder’s 1938 comedy, an earlier version of the play later revised as The Matchmaker. Wilder expanded and reworked this less successful predecessor into The Matchmaker.

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