Thornton Wilder’s Last Play Vanished Into Thin Air. Or Did It?

Our Town, Thoronton Wilder’s audacious, format-breaking 1938 play, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and remains a dark, daring cultural touchstone. (It plays a prominent part in Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake and Jon Mooallem’s This is Chance!, among others.) The Emporium, Wilder’s daring follow-up, ultimately escaped his grasp. Decades after Wilder shelved it, Kirk Lynn, another playwright, surfaced the pieces of Wilder’s abandoned masterpiece and, in a task worthy of a Wilder play (or a Charlie Kaufman script), sets himself to completing The Emporium.

The sheer volume of materials could have made four plays. About 360 pages are devoted to the nine discrete scenes Wilder evidently imagined. But some of those scenes, Lynn discovered, were partial. One is a single, plaintive line: “Do you want to go home, dear?” Others appear in as many as eight different drafts. Even the parts that seemed nearly finished didn’t match the rest. Names of characters keep changing. Scene 9, at the end, is sometimes called Scene 1. References in 100 pages of letters and journal entries also held at the Beinecke show that Wilder imagined writing a prologue that would go smack in the middle of the play, or somewhere else unexpected. But he never wrote it.