Thornton Wilder's The Emporium tickets

Experience the final play by Thornton Wilder, the legendary, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. The Emporium plays for a limited run at Classic Stage Company starting this April and follows a young man who seeks a meaningful life by traversing the city, and far beyond, to encounter a world of wonder.

The play was long believed to be lost as it was Wilder's final, uncompleted work. However, working with Wilder's family, playwright Kirk Lynn has worked the text to ready it for the stage in a premiere production staged by Rob Melrose. Its debut promises to be a singular theatrical event.

“Launched in 1947 amid a storm of rising acclaim and honorable artistic duties and distractions here and abroad, Thornton Wilder (who appeared on the cover of Time in January 1953) struggled unsuccessfully for a decade to complete a major new drama. Thanks to enticing and regular press coverage, its title was known far and wide: The Emporium,” said Tappan Wilder, nephew to Thornton Wilder, in a statement.

“The Wilder family can’t be too grateful to Kirk Lynn for exploring the known published and little-known vast unpublished archival record of this work, grounded in Wilder’s passionate post-WWII encounter with existentialism, and then agreeing to complete a play exploring the loneliness of the American experience in all its humor, sadness, hope — and freedom," he went on to say. "With a deep bow of thanks to Classic Stage Company, it is no small benefit of this unusual artistic collaboration across the decades that it celebrates the life, times and creativity of two distinguished artists, then and now.”