By Kristen Lowrey
Assistant A& E Editor

Adventure, acceptance and awakening. “The Matchmaker” has all three of these themes, not to mention romance, deceit and dancing.

Director George Neilson stresses these three themes with his student cast and emphasizes the relation of the themes to becoming active in life.

“It’s about joining the human race,” Neilson said of the play. “(The Matchmaker) is like that song by Lee Ann Womack, ‘I Hope You Dance.’ This is similar. Don’t sit outside. ‘If you get the chance, … dance’ as the song goes.”

“The Matchmaker,” which features a student cast, opened Wednesday in Smothers Theatre and runs through Saturday.

“Our cast is just so much fun because we’re just so crazy and wild,” sophomore Taylor Bartolucci said.

Bartolucci plays the lead role of the Matchmaker, Dolly Levi. “The Matchmaker” is set in the 1880s in the small town of Yonkers just up the Hudson River from New York City. Horace Vandergelder, a rich widower and dry-goods merchant, has decided to remarry. He hires Levi, who arranges for him to meet a pretty widow who owns a hat shop in the city.

“(Dolly is) really the instigator of all the things that happen in the play,” Bartolucci said. “In every role, you have a little bit of that character in you. She just has the spark of life and energy in her at all times.”

Vandergelder departs for the city to court the woman and leaves his store in the hands of two employees, Cornelius Hackl and Barnaby Tucker, played by junior Joe Obermueller and sophomore Brian Jones. The two men create a plot to find adventure in the city as well and accidentally find themselves in the hat shop where Vandergelder is expected.

“Although Barnaby is wary of the adventurous trip into New York, he soon comes to enjoy the excitement and adventure that comes with disobeying your boss and spending all your money,” Jones said of his character.

Sophomore Brandon Birtwistle plays Ambross Kemper, an artist who is deeply in love with Ermengarde, Vandergelder’s niece, played by junior Breanne Shows. However, Vandergelder is trying to keep them apart.

“Kemper tries to get her to run away with him,” Jones said. “He is your typical artsy, lover character.”

Written by American playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder, “The Matchmaker” made its debut at the Edinburgh Festival in 1954, with American star Ruth Gordon playing Levi.  The show later moved to Broadway where it became a hit musical and later a hit film under the title “Hello, Dolly!”

“The musical in my opinion does not hold a candle to the play,” Neilson said.

Wilder won three Pulitzer Prizes for his works including his novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” in 1927, and the plays “Our Town” in 1938 and “The Skin of Our Teeth” in 1942.

“We’ve never done Thornton Wilder,” Neilson said. “This play was sort of his tongue-and-cheek version of the well-made play at the time. Supposedly the audience is normally looking at the action through the fourth wall. Wilder didn’t like that so he wrote this play which includes direct interaction with the audience.”

Almost all of Wilder’s plays combine an unusual mix of realism, symbolism, expressionism and folksy humor, and seek to find mystical beauty in everyday life according to The Shaw, a theater company that hosts a theater festival each year.

Neilson said that he chose “The Matchmaker” as his spring theater project after the department chose the drama “Two Rooms” for the fall, in which an American prisoner is held hostage.

“‘Two Rooms’ was a heavy piece, very serious,” Neilson said. “We were looking for something light to complement that.”

Through “The Matchmaker,” Neilson said that Wilder encourages more adventure in our lives.

“I think youth, and older people as well, need to learn to get up and dance as they do in ‘The Matchmaker,’” Neilson said.

April 04, 2002