Theatre in Review: The Emporium (Classic Stage Company)

	Mahira Kakkar, Eva Kaminsky, Candy Buckley, Patrick Kerr. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

When famous writers become industries, the temptation is overwhelming to make use of every last word they ever wrote. (In my college days, if somebody found a cocktail napkin with jottings by Fitzgerald or Hemingway, it found its way to a publishing house.) Because Thornton Wilder wrote relatively few plays vis-à-vis his novels, he has become fair game for people like the playwright and academic Kirk Lynn, who, rooting through Wilder's papers, discovered 360 handwritten pages of an unproduced play, apparently announced twice for Broadway, at least once starring Montgomery Clift. Kirk, a true raider of the lost archives, got permission from the Wilder estate to adapt it for the stage. Whether he can sell us on The Emporium is another matter.

It's impossible to know how the show unfolding onstage at CSC relates to Wilder's original text, on which he labored at length, eventually abandoning it in 1954. But it sounds like Lynn's Emporium is what the ladies of my mother's generation would call a notions store, made up of bits and bobs of the playwright's ideas and writing style, mixed with textual commentary and some invented scenes. Even so, it's an endlessly wandering narrative. The protagonist, John, is an orphan who, fleeing the institution where he was raised, spends several unhappy years as a farmhand before eventually moving to a large city, determined to find employment at the Gillespie and Schwingemeister Emporium, allegedly the "world's most famous department store."

Why John wants this rather than being, say, a plumber or a machinist is never made clear. In any case, his dream job is a tall order, for the G&S Emporium is opaque, a place of enduring mystery. The members of top management are never seen. Hiring practices are unusual, even bizarre; one character is given a position after being caught shoplifting. Pay scales are impossible to parse. And the product line includes such offerings as "imperceptible jewelry." One unanswered question is why everyone at G&S doesn't prefer to work at the competition, Craigies, where the work is less demanding, the pay is more equitable, and everyone can look forward to attending the annual "Worker's Holiday Gala," held at the stately mansion of the store's owner.

But few questions are answered, so devoted is The Emporium to tracking John's ponderous progress through life -- and so given to waxing philosophical is the extensive cast of characters. (The latter includes a trio of kibitzers, allegedly drawn from the audience but really wards of the Retreat for Retired Department Store Workers, one of many cutesy metatheatrical devices.) Indeed, it takes forever to get to the emporium, because Wilder and/or Lynn prefer to dawdle on John's life in the orphanage and, later, his soul-barren farm existence; most of this material could be cut without damage to the script.

Once the emporium looms large in John's existence, one has to wonder about its enigmatic presence, the sheer vagueness of its conception. Various theories are floated about what the store represents, among them a career in the arts or, less specifically, a life filled with personal meaning and emotional stability. One of Lynn's inventions is an audience vote, held at intermission, about whether to include a scene by him, overtly discussing the play's themes. At the performance I attended, the "Yes" vote carried the day by a significant plurality, but I suspect that most audiences vote that way, being so starved for meaning at that point. However one feels about it, the emporium is difficult to get into, unaccommodating to those who toil there, and ultimately unknowable in its particulars. If it is meant to stand in for any aspect of modern life, it does so without so much as hinting at a bit of joy or satisfaction.

There is some evidence that Wilder, burdened by his past successes, struggled to create an air of originality in The Emporium, which may explain its many labored and/or whimsical devices. Bernice, a sales associate, confiscates a Molotov cocktail from "the restless, uncultured mob," pointing to the audience. She also puts up a chalkboard to tot up the "nine tough goodbyes" that John will experience across the evening. The couple who run the orphanage are named -- wait for it -- Foster, and they give their charges names like Alexander Hamilton Foster and Aaron Burr Foster. (The bandying about of historical names to comic effect calls to mind The Skin of Our Teeth.) Studying a handwritten application, an HR type says, "Your handwriting's worse than Thornton Wilder's." The script is filled with mild bits along the lines of "I can teach you patience, but it's going to take a while!" By the time the action arrives at a finale that resolves nothing, you may feel your patience has been sorely tested.

The Houston-based director Rob Melrose stages these cloudy, slow-moving proceedings with surprising verve, aided by a first-class design team. Walt Spangler's two-level set, dominated by an enormous sign announcing the play's title in color-changing LED tape, is one of his most theatrical creations. Cat Tate Starmer's lighting is gorgeous and moody, using unexpected color accents on the theatre's walls. Barring one or two slight oddities, Alejo Vietti's costumes are meticulous mid-twentieth-century creations. Darron L West's sound design blends many musical selections -- a bit of Aaron Copland, a dance band arrangement of "I'm Beginning to See the Light" -- with expertly done effects, including a squeaky door.

The cast is as good as the script will allow. Joe Tapper does his considerable best to make John a compelling figure, but he and Cassia Thompson as Laurencia, the salesgirl of his dreams, are stuck with painfully underwritten characters. (Laurencia has a brief speech about the cosmos that recalls Emily Webb's musings in Our Town about the Mind of God.) Even if their presence is, strictly speaking, unnecessary, Mahira Kakkar, Eva Kaminsky, and Patrick Kerr are engaging presences as interlopers from the audience. Derek Smith is appropriately bureaucratic and/or Scroogelike as various middle managers and orphan wranglers. ("I was a child once, too. Briefly.") But the production rests almost entirely in the larcenous hands of Candy Buckley, in a variety of roles, finding comic gold as a predatory heiress with Raggedy-Ann hair, pop-bottle glasses, and a sea-green party gown dotted with sparkly ribbons. (Based on this piece and The Matchmaker, Wilder must have really had it in for young ladies named Ermengarde.) "All eyes on me," she announces at one point, and who could deny her?

The Emporium manages some affecting moments near the end as John confronts the Sisyphean nature of his existence, but this is an exhausting journey with no clear destination, populated by blank characters and filled with pronouncements rather than dialogue. According to his biographer, Penelope Niven, Wilder was frustrated by his lack of progress on The Emporium, admitting that, turning to other projects, he lost the thread of its argument. Indeed, he feared that "the whole thing may be a wild preposterous lapse of judgment on my part (and oh, how badly I can write); and that I may not digest and compass a true ending." When a playwright delivers such an acute self-analysis, who needs critics? --David Barbour