The Emporium<\/a>, now running at Classic Stage Company (the play had its world premiere at Houston\u2019s Alley Theatre in 2024). He tells us, via a prologue delivered by Joe Tapper, how he dove headfirst into the archives at the Yale library (suggested on Walt Spangler\u2019s set by three large tables with binder-clipped pages on top) and found a trove of manuscripts that hinted at what that final play might have looked like.<\/p>\n![\"94](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/94_The_Emporium_CSC_Production_Photos_2026_HR_Final_Credit_Marc_J_Franklin.jpg\" "\\"94")
Cassia Thompson in Thornton Wilder\u2019s The Emporium, directed by Rob Melrose, at Classic Stage Company.
(\u00a9 Marc J Franklin)<\/p>\n
The result, however, is like taking a hammer to that stubborn nut and letting the pieces fly. Lynn and director Rob Melrose do deserve praise for their attempt to make sense of a play that even its own author couldn\u2019t figure out, but what we get in the end is less an emporium and more an old curiosity shop.<\/p>\n
The story follows John (Tapper) on his journey from childhood in a strange orphanage run by the chronically coughing Mr. Foster (Derek Smith) to adulthood and a quest to find employment at the mysterious Gillespie and Schwingemeister Emporium, the world\u2019s most famous department store (represented by huge neon-lit letters).<\/p>\n
One problem is that even the well-dressed staff\u2014Cassia Thompson as Laurencia and Smith as Mr. Hobmeyer, both smartly costumed by Alejo Vietti\u2014have no idea how people get hired. Not even the employment agency manager, Mrs. Dobbs (Candy Buckley, the play\u2019s hit-or-miss go-to for laughs), knows how people there secure their positions. So John gets a job at the Emporium\u2019s competition, Craigie\u2019s, down the block, all the while pining for an unattainable job that he may never get.<\/p>\n
![\"58](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/58_The_Emporium_CSC_Production_Photos_2026_HR_Final_Credit_Marc_J_Franklin.jpg\" "\\"58")
Candy Buckley, Patrick Kerr, Joe Tapper, Eva Kaminsky, and Mahira Kakkar in The Emporium, directed by Rob Melrose, at Classic Stage Company.
(\u00a9 Marc J Franklin)<\/p>\n
Wilder had imagined his emporium would be an inscrutable place riddled with byzantine rules and absurdities along the lines of the castle in Kafka\u2019s (also unfinished) last novel. Lynn certainly does convey the inscrutable aspects of the work as he stitches Wilder\u2019s scenes together into a narrative that becomes more disjointed as it progresses, ultimately coming back around to its beginning (a nod to Wilder\u2019s familiar themes of life cycles and the circularity of time). \u201cTerrible news. It\u2019s canceled. Go home,\u201d we\u2019re told at beginning and again at the end of the play. If only.<\/p>\n
That impatience with the play not the fault of the cast, who buoy up the choppy plot with solid and often delightfully absurd performances. Buckley and Smith in particular stand out for their unflagging endurance in about half a dozen roles apiece. And to Lynn\u2019s credit, justice is done to Wilder\u2019s typical metatheatrical playfulness, perplexing as that sometimes can be (Cat Tate Starmer\u2019s lighting design and Darron L. West\u2019s Foley-artist-like sound effects never let us forget we\u2019re in a theater). Three \u201caudience members\u201d (Mahira Kakkar, Eva Kaminsky, and Patrick Kerr) join the cast onstage where they watch the action and comment on it until they eventually become a part of it. Lynn takes this a step further by getting the actual audience involved as well, asking us to bleat like sheep and use our cellphones to \u201castroclate\u201d (a coinage for seeing meaning in the vast infinitude of stars\u2014a very Thornton Wilder idea).<\/p>\n
![\"255](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/255_The_Emporium_CSC_Production_Photos_2026_HR_Final_Credit_Marc_J_Franklin.jpg\" "\\"255")
The audience \u201castroclates\u201d at\u00a0The Emporium. Left: Candy Buckley. Above: Cassia Thompson and Joe Tapper.
(\u00a9 Marc J Franklin)<\/p>\n
But whether you participate in the bleating or astroclating might depend on how exhausted you\u2019ve become trying to make sense of it all. What is the Emporium really? Wilder imagined explaining it to us in a \u201cprologue\u201d at the beginning of Act 2, though he ultimately abandoned the idea. Lynn lets us vote in the lobby during intermission on whether the cast will perform its own prologue (not Wilder\u2019s words) explaining his intent. I did not vote, but I was against knowing, first, because I had my own ideas about the store\u2019s symbolism and I didn\u2019t want to be influenced by the author, and second, it would make the show longer (final run time: two hours and 15 minutes).<\/p>\n
I won\u2019t tell you the secret (the tally at the performance I attended was 42 for an explanation of Wilder\u2019s intent, 8 against), but it was less satisfying than you might imagine. Sometimes it\u2019s better not to know an author\u2019s thoughts about their own work. While it is tantalizing to read these scenes in print (some have been published), Wilder kept The Emporium from the stage for one reason or another. It\u2019s probably best to keep it that way, and let it repose among the stars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Candy Buckley and Joe Tapper (far right) in Kirk Lynn\u2019s adaptation of Thornton Wilder\u2019s The Emporium, directed by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":236220,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-236219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236219\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/236220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"11](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/11_The_Emporium_CSC_Production_Photos_2026_HR_Final_Credit_Marc_J_Franklin.jpg\" "\\"11")
Candy Buckley and Joe Tapper (far right) in Kirk Lynn\u2019s adaptation of Thornton Wilder\u2019s The Emporium, directed by Rob Melrose, at Classic Stage Company.