Word: dialectical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Southerners will undoubtedly be offended at the play's vision of them--naive, stupid, raucous, and unable to master their own dialect. There is not a Confederate in the cast. Yankee morals triumph, the plantation's only virgin is corrupted, and tradition falls. Northern gag men must sparkle to get away with this; they don't, principally because the comedy has a minimum number of funny lines. Any Jackie Gleason fan can predict virtually every ensuing speech...
Helmore's realization at the end of the play that there are worse things in life than an untouched debutante seems quite convincing. His problem with accent is alarming; allegedly proper Bostonian and Harvardian, his dialect would place him somewhere between Trafalgar Square and Whitehall. But he is agreeably suave, unfaltering, and journalistic. Inger Stevens, the innocent partner, is difficult to confine on one theatre stage. While she must be obstreperous, she loses control completely. She is pretty, though, and in frank talk with Helmore is quite expressive. G. Albert Smith, as her father, has lost all Southern restraint...
...numbers, Hong Kong's 2,400,000 Chinese, speaking every dialect of the mainland, dominate the colony, but a few thousand English-speaking whites run it. The mellow beat of wooden clogs on pavement, the clatter of mah-jongg pieces, the wail of radios tuned to Chinese opera, the brays of hawkers and cries of countless babies, all insist on its Chineseness-but the eye is reminded, by the flap of the Union Jack and the crisp gesture of a traffic cop, that here, as nowhere else in Asia, British "law and order" yet prevail...
...author has, in fact, produced a wonderfully funny comedy by combining two very different comic techniques. He has gone back several centuries for gimmicks like people hidden in closets, boys dressed as girls, chairs pulled out from under their prospective occupants, burlesque dialect and gestures, and even bad jokes. But Wilder has not forgotten the innovating spirit of his Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth days, either. Every main character in The Matchmaker has at least one outright soliloquy in which he steps up to the footlights and blatantly tells the audience his thoughts and motivations...
...slapstick is a theatrical narcotic, and both Wilder and director Tyrone Guthric almost inhale too much of the stuff. Having written the play expressly for Ruth Gordon in the role of Mrs. Levi, the author has given her too many lines that depend on dialect alone. Guthrie has compounded the peccadillo by letting Miss Gordon maintain her rasping voice too loud for too much of the time. The result, especially when Loring Smith is sharing the scene as the booming and gesticulating Vandergelder, is a shouting match that numbs the audience and detracts from those scenes wherein pandemonium reigns legitimately...