Review: Thornton Wilder’s The Emporium Still Feels Unfinished at Classic Stage Company

In 1948 Thornton Wilder, who had already established his reputation as a major American dramatist with Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), started working on a new play. Inspired by Franz Kafka’s The Castle, he drafted a few scenes but couldn’t figure out how they fit together. After laying the play aside, he began wrestling with it again and, in 1952, seemed confident that it would soon be ready for Broadway. Montgomery Clift was rumored for the lead.

Unfortunately, The Emporium never made it to the stage, too tough a nut for Wilder to crack. Wilder did, however, write extensively about his ideas for the play in his journals, and several scenes also found their way into his archives at Yale’s Beinecke Library.

Kirk Lynn provides these facts and more at the outset of his well-researched but cumbersome adaptation of The Emporium, now running at Classic Stage Company (the play had its world premiere at Houston’s Alley Theatre in 2024). He tells us, via a prologue delivered by Joe Tapper, how he dove headfirst into the archives at the Yale library (suggested on Walt Spangler’s set by three large tables with binder-clipped pages on top) and found a trove of manuscripts that hinted at what that final play might have looked like.

The result, however, is like taking a hammer to that stubborn nut and letting the pieces fly. Lynn and director Rob Melrose do deserve praise for their attempt to make sense of a play that even its own author couldn’t figure out, but what we get in the end is less an emporium and more an old curiosity shop.

The story follows John (Tapper) on his journey from childhood in a strange orphanage run by the chronically coughing Mr. Foster (Derek Smith) to adulthood and a quest to find employment at the mysterious Gillespie and Schwingemeister Emporium, the world’s most famous department store (represented by huge neon-lit letters).

One problem is that even the well-dressed staff—Cassia Thompson as Laurencia and Smith as Mr. Hobmeyer, both smartly costumed by Alejo Vietti—have no idea how people get hired. Not even the employment agency manager, Mrs. Dobbs (Candy Buckley, the play’s hit-or-miss go-to for laughs), knows how people there secure their positions. So John gets a job at the Emporium’s competition, Craigie’s, down the block, all the while pining for an unattainable job that he may never get.

Wilder had imagined his emporium would be an inscrutable place riddled with byzantine rules and absurdities along the lines of the castle in Kafka’s (also unfinished) last novel. Lynn certainly does convey the inscrutable aspects of the work as he stitches Wilder’s scenes together into a narrative that becomes more disjointed as it progresses, ultimately coming back around to its beginning (a nod to Wilder’s familiar themes of life cycles and the circularity of time). “Terrible news. It’s canceled. Go home,” we’re told at beginning and again at the end of the play. If only.

That impatience with the play not the fault of the cast, who buoy up the choppy plot with solid and often delightfully absurd performances. Buckley and Smith in particular stand out for their unflagging endurance in about half a dozen roles apiece. And to Lynn’s credit, justice is done to Wilder’s typical metatheatrical playfulness, perplexing as that sometimes can be (Cat Tate Starmer’s lighting design and Darron L. West’s Foley-artist-like sound effects never let us forget we’re in a theater). Three “audience members” (Mahira Kakkar, Eva Kaminsky, and Patrick Kerr) join the cast onstage where they watch the action and comment on it until they eventually become a part of it. Lynn takes this a step further by getting the actual audience involved as well, asking us to bleat like sheep and use our cellphones to “astroclate” (a coinage for seeing meaning in the vast infinitude of stars—a very Thornton Wilder idea).

But whether you participate in the bleating or astroclating might depend on how exhausted you’ve become trying to make sense of it all. What is the Emporium really? Wilder imagined explaining it to us in a “prologue” at the beginning of Act 2, though he ultimately abandoned the idea. Lynn lets us vote in the lobby during intermission on whether the cast will perform its own prologue (not Wilder’s words) explaining his intent. I did not vote, but I was against knowing, first, because I had my own ideas about the store’s symbolism and I didn’t want to be influenced by the author, and second, it would make the show longer (final run time: two hours and 15 minutes).

I won’t tell you the secret (the tally at the performance I attended was 42 for an explanation of Wilder’s intent, 8 against), but it was less satisfying than you might imagine. Sometimes it’s better not to know an author’s thoughts about their own work. While it is tantalizing to read these scenes in print (some have been published), Wilder kept The Emporium from the stage for one reason or another. It’s probably best to keep it that way, and let it repose among the stars.