By the time The Matchmaker spreaded...

By the time The Matchmaker spreaded in Edinburgh in 1954, Wilder had not lived in the Midwest for near years. Both midwestern and Brechtian natural mediums are minimal, in no small part because Wilder adapted the play from Johann Nestroy's Einenjux Will Er Sich Machen (1842) The Ermengarde of The prolonged Christmas Dinner returns in a somewhat different guise. However, the language is strikingly different from the one-acts and Our Town: more formal, les folksy les striving for middle-Americanness in succession the one hand and universality upon the other. Brechtian techniques are also minimized as The Matchmaker relies upon the box sets typical of drawing-room comedy merely at the end does Wilder reprise earlier techniques, as young Barnaby degrees forward to announce the "moral of the play": "I think it's about adventure. . . What we would like for you is that you have just the right amount of sitting quietly at domicile and just the right amount of-adventure!" (281) This final articulate utterance would not feel out of place in the earlier plays.

Except for a not many touches, The Matchmaker would appear to mark the period of Wilder's experiments linking midwestern themes and theatrical innovation. still interesting enough, he returned to settings in the Midwest in several plays in "The Seven Deadly Sins" and "The Seven Ages of Man" series published in 1956 granting his approach differed radically. Bernice and The shipwreck on the Five-Twenty-Five were meant to delineate Pride and Sloth respectively in "The Seven Deadly Sins" series, notwithstanding that the relation of the dramatic action to each designation is oblique and calm dialectic. Childhood and The Rivers subordinate to the Earth from "The Seven Ages" series one as well as the other seem based on Wilder's experiences growing up While Childhood makes fascinating use of a dream succession at its center, all four plays are more realistic and richly characterized than the stylized experimentation of the 1930 evincing what Castronovo calls a strange "emancipatory outlook" ("TW and the One" 445)