Review Roundup: Thornton Wilder's THE EMPORIUM at Classic Stage Company

Read reviews for Classic Stage Company’s New York premiere of Thornton Wilder’s final play, The Emporium, adapted and completed by Kirk Lynn and directed by Rob Melrose. 

Thornton Wilder’s The Emporium is now in performances at CSC’s Lynn F. Angelson Theater. This limited engagement is running through June 7.

Thornton Wilder’s The Emporium features Candy Buckley, Mahira Kakkar, Eva Kaminsky, Patrick Kerr, Derek Smith, Joe Tapper, and Cassia Thompson.

More than 75 years in the making, an unfinished work by one of America’s greatest dramatists takes the New York stage at last. The Emporium unveils Thornton Wilder’s final play, brought to life through playwright Kirk Lynn’s masterful completion.

As a young man journeys through the city and beyond, he encounters a world of wonder, meaning, and the elusive truths of life itself. Wilder’s long-unseen masterpiece is finally ready to be discovered, offering a rare chance to experience a new work from a legendary voice. 

Helen Shaw, The New York Times: Lynn has a long catalog of excellent plays, and given another whack, he might find a more active approach to Wilder’s archive. In 2011, he and the Rude Mechs company brought “The Method Gun” to New York, and I still remember its audacity — at one point, the group performed incidental lines from Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” while dodging swinging pendulums. That spirit of danger is exactly what’s missing in this lugubrious Emporium. There might be a terror to adapting a giant like Williams or Wilder, but the answer ain’t reverence: You’ve got to get in there and dance.

Mike Dressel, Slant Magazine: Quoted in a 1950 article in the New York Times, Wilder said his play was “a kind of a mixture of Horatio Alger and Franz Kafka, with a department store serving as the central image.” That did seem to be his m.o., mixing European experiments with narrative and form and a can-do American determination. It’s interesting to consider the department store as a relic, having given way to the mall, which succumbed to the big box store, before online retailers became the market leaders. Some might say that certain art forms are relics too, yet we pursue them because a life without them offers what exactly? Given the world we inhabit, which seems designed to drive us toward the monotony of Craigie’s, we probably need the Emporium more than ever.

Michael Sommers, New York Stage Review: Then there are Mahira Kakkar, Eva Kaminsky and Patrick Kerr, popping up as late-arriving theatergoers who morph into vaguely defined commentators along the edges of the story who may also represent The Fates or gods, but anyway are agreeable company. Viewers conversant with Wilder’s works are likely to enjoy speculating on such possibilities, as with other puzzling aspects here. A worthwhile attempt to piece together an ambitious drama despite its missing, unknown or conflicting parts, The Emporium remains an unfulfilled promise of an expansive work on eternal themes.

Frank Scheck, New York Stage Review: It would be thrilling to report that The Emporium is a newly discovered masterpiece by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. But while the play is distinctly Wilderian in its style and themes, it comes across today like a rambling, disjointed mess that only periodically sparks to life. Of course, it’s hard to know exactly how much Lynn contributed, but from what’s on display here it seems evident that the play, which at one point was supposed to be headed for Broadway in a production starring Montgomery Clift, was best left in the drawer.

Austin Fimmano, New York Theatre Guide: The plot is barely there, looping back on itself with the barest concept of linear time, but the metaphor of the Emporium itself looms large — figuratively and also literally, in this case, in bright lights that take up most of the back wall. It’s up to audiences to figure out what the dream of the Emporium represents for John, Laurencia, and the rest of the Emporium employees, and that's all what Wilder apparently hoped for. Whether or not this show is for you may depend on your devotion to Thornton Wilder, your love of metaphor, or “a third thing” — that is to say, the undefined secret John searches for his entire life.

Thom Geier, Culture Sauce: It also becomes clear why The Emporium was never completed or produced in Wilder’s lifetime — despite two announcements of a Broadway production (including one starring Montgomery Clift). Both Wilder and Lynn seem constrained by the structure of the piece, with nine scenes and nine goodbyes, which doesn’t allow the natural development of character or plot. Instead, we get repeated invocations of Big Picture conflicts — pleasure vs. delayed gratification, exacting standards vs. crass commercialism, risk-taking vs. security — that are never dramatized in any way that truly registers. (John at one point considers abandoning Laurencia for the daughter of his non-Emporium boss, but we know he doesn’t really mean it and the flirtation ends almost immediately after it’s introduced.)

Average Rating: 70.0%