The recently unearthed manuscript of Thornton Wilder’s 'The Emporium' has finally reached the stage, only to buckle under the catastrophic weight of its own central conceit: a young man who actually wishes to work at a department store.
While one can certainly forgive the late dramatist for failing to anticipate the necrotic collapse of the American department store, it is quite another thing entirely to ask a contemporary audience to bear witness to a young Midwestern boy looking upon a floor of discounted haberdashery with the sort of untrammeled awe typically reserved for the divine; a feat of suspension of disbelief so strenuous it makes the metaphysical machinations of Goethe’s Faust, the impenetrable structuralist void of B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, and the cinematic oeuvre of Kevin James’s Paul Blart: Mall Cop appear, by comparison, as starkly rendered documentaries. The modern theatergoer—whom, one must invariably remind oneself, requires explicit instruction simply to unwrap a lozenge prior to the rising of the curtain—is uniquely ill-equipped to process the existential tragedy of a protagonist who believes folding slacks for a regional manager is a triumph of the human spirit.
Wilder, whose Our Town long ago established his penchant for extracting cosmic significance from the devastatingly mundane, attempts in The Emporium to transmute the soul-crushing drudgery of inventory management into a picaresque fable of self-actualization. Yet, as the boy gazes longingly at the polished brass revolving doors of the titular store, one cannot help but feel a profound, aching sorrow for a narrative architecture so fundamentally severed from reality; an architecture wherein the climax hinges not on the inevitable revelation of wage theft or the brutalizing realization that one's labor is being extracted to subsidize a private equity firm's leveraged buyout, but rather on whether our hero might be permitted to properly organize the seasonal display of sensible cardigans.
This dissonance between the author's mid-century optimism and the bleak, fluorescent-lit reality of contemporary commerce ultimately renders the work less a play than an extended, grim hallucination.
It is frankly insulting to ask a paying public to sympathize with a character whose grandest ambition is to be screamed at by a suburban matron over an expired coupon.
Indeed, one leaves the theater not with the catharsis of Aristotelian tragedy, nor with the quiet resonance of a life fully observed, but rather with the creeping, inescapable dread that somewhere, perhaps in the darkest recesses of the Midwest, someone is still filling out an online application for J.C. Penney, entirely unaware of the doom that awaits them.