The first thing you should know about “The Emporium,” especially if you’ve heard it’s a newly discovered play by Thornton Wilder, is that it isn’t exactly by Thornton Wilder.
Before Wilder died in 1975, he did write a lot of it, or, rather, he wrote too much of it. According to the show itself, which opened on Monday at the Classic Stage Company, Wilder’s collected papers contain at least 360 handwritten pages of notes and partial drafts. The playwright Kirk Lynn, who completed and adapted these texts into a 79-page play, sifted through a blizzard of material, searching for the master’s original purpose. Of course, Lynn did redact one crucial element — Wilder’s intention not to publish.
The resulting play is part picaresque, part fable: A foundling, John (Joe Tapper), runs away from his Midwestern orphanage to the big city, hoping to find a job at the titular Emporium. This department store, though, is existentially peculiar: Prices fluctuate randomly, and neither the head floorwalker (Derek Smith), nor the delightful shopgirl, Laurencia (Cassia Thompson), can tell John where to deliver his application.
Time stretches like boardwalk taffy, and John finds himself farther from employment at the Emporium the more he pursues it. And why does he resist working at its competitor, Craigie’s, for so long? Classical overtones abound: Candy Buckley, clowning as hard as she can, plays various women who delay John on his odyssey; a chorus of retired workers kibitzes, chatting about potential meanings of the play. Eventually, a new baby is abandoned on the Emporium’s steps, and we begin the orphan-to-applicant cycle all over again.
With “Our Town,” Wilder popularized no-set sets, so the designer Walt Spangler provides a few tables, some boxes and a huge, rusty EMPORIUM sign — in the shadowy lighting provided by Cat Tate Starmer, the brick-and-wood 13th Street Theater looks more like a warehouse than ever. And Wilder was interested in audience participation, so the director Rob Melrose incorporates several cutesy interactive touches. We fill out complaint cards, for instance: The night I went, someone was annoyed about weekend service on the A train.
We also vote at intermission, casting ballots about whether we’ll hear a mid-show “prologue,” proposed by Wilder but written by Lynn, which decodes the play’s central metaphor. If you would vote against such a thing, you might want to skip the next paragraph.
Wilder, supposedly, was writing an allegory about a life in the arts. It’s an underdeveloped analogy, although the Emporium’s elusiveness about entry-level positions — and reliance on free labor — will be familiar to anyone attempting a theater career. With the creative industry as the symbolic matrix, what should we make of the weirdly despised Craigie’s department store? It, at least, manages to pay its staff, yet when we meet Craigie himself (Smith again), he grumbles that his shop lacks the Emporium’s cachet. It’s never made explicit, but academia is a traditional artists’ refuge, and Lynn works at the University of Texas, Austin, as the head of playwriting. I will leave that there.
If there’s an anti-academic critique in “The Emporium,” it’s recursive. Lynn did his research in the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the text announces its own importance, like a professor rallying her students. “What you want is just one more play by Thornton Wilder!” says John, both speaking for Lynn and trying to gin up enthusiasm. “How could he abandon it?” he asks. Good question.
Wilder noodled around with “The Emporium” for roughly a decade in the 1950s and early ’60s, reading bits with friends, even announcing Broadway productions that never bore fruit. The aesthetic, though, belongs to provocations made 30 years earlier: It recalls Elmer Rice’s 1923 “The Adding Machine,” particularly the preoccupation with reincarnation and a soul-eating workplace, and it owes huge debts to Kafka’s bureaucratic nightmare, “The Castle,” from 1926. Perhaps Wilder felt his references had grown stale.
And, in 1960, right around the time Wilder would have been struggling with the play, Dwight Macdonald branded him in the Partisan Review as the prime example of the “midcult,” which he saw as the nation’s capitulation to middlebrow, platitudinous sentimentalism. “At once ultrasimple and grandiose,” Macdonald called Wilder’s writing. A playwright’s taste for fable might pall in the face of a description like that. I certainly thought of Macdonald when I was faced with the show’s coy jollity, and I wondered if Wilder once thought of him too.
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.
The Emporium
Through June 7 at Classic Stage Company, Manhattan; classicstage.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
