After seeing director David Cromer's 2009 production of Our Town off Broadway, Kirk Lynn decided to read all of Thornton Wilder's writings — not just his published plays, but also his letters and journals. "In his journals, there's two scenes of this play and journal entries that talk about reading it with friends," Lynn recalled. "So I thought, 'Oh, this play exists somewhere.'"

He was "flabbergasted" to find 300 handwritten pages of it in Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The document contained nine distinct scenes that, though they didn't all connect perfectly, had "a full narrative arc," Lynn said.

"I thought of myself as a carpenter or a finisher [...] a lot of it was joining them and smoothing it over," he continued. A line from the play, "Every life has nine big goodbyes in it," is his connecting theme: "In each scene, someone says goodbye to someone. Like all Thornton Wilder, there's a rich sadness in it that as beautiful as life is, it's also quite difficult."

Lynn also wrote a new prologue for the show, where actor Joe Tapper discusses the play's history in the writer's voice before he morphs into the main character of John.

The Emporium of the play's title is a "mythical department store," as Tapper describes it, reminiscent of American stores like Woolworth's, Gimbels, Henri Bendel, or Macy's in their 20th-century heyday. John travels to the big city with dreams of working there, but he discovers there's no way to actually enter the Emporium for an interview.

The plot is inspired by Franz Kafka's novel The Castle — also unfinished — about a man who can't get to his appointment at a castle. Both works, said Lynn, deal with "the mystery of trying to get the meeting that will change your life," the frustration when it doesn't pan out, and how we find our way in life anyway.

Director Rob Melrose also sees The Emporium as a metaphor for a life in the arts. "It's Thornton Wilder’s meditation on how a regular, capitalist, rags-to-riches story has a very clear ladder of advancement, whereas in the arts, you can feel like you're out in the wilderness for years."

In fact, talk of an Emporium Broadway run surfaced twice; The New York Times reported on it in 1950 and 1952. "I think [Wilder] and [director] Jed [Harris] felt they were close enough that if he could just pull it all together... and he never quite put it all together," Lynn said.

It would have been a big event. Lynn learned of the play when he found a separate report from the period saying Montgomery Clift and Mary Morris were attached. And according to current cast member Candy Buckley, Tallulah Bankhead was once set to play her role, which encompasses six characters.

Those productions never panned out, of course, but Old Hollywood buffs may spot an Easter egg in one of Buckley's lines. One of her characters loses her mind and exclaims, 'I can't see'" — a reference to Italian actress Anna Magnani, a friend of Wilder's, delivering the same line in The Fugitive Kind opposite Marlon Brando.

Don't worry — The Emporium isn't interactive. "It's very playful, and it asks the audience to take part," Derek Smith said, but added, "Nobody's pulled up on stage, so don't stay away for that reason. It's friendly, not aggressive."

It's more that the audience is "like the last character in the play," said Eva Kaminsky, and attendees should feel immersed in John's journey and can even vocally respond at select moments. Classic Stage Company seats the audience on three sides of the stage, so the action unfolds all throughout the space.

Kaminsky, Mahira Kakkar, and Patrick Kerr even play "audience members" who end up joining the action. Kakkar and Kerr, for example, are a couple seeing the show on their quarterly outing from the retirement home — "as we let the actors know, interrupting them in the middle of their scene," Kakkar said. "We show up late to the show and make a fuss getting in."

Characters like these bridge the gap between the worlds of the audience and the play. "I tend to think of our characters as Fates, or guides through the main character's world," Kaminsky said. "Sometimes we're just watching, and sometimes we take on whatever is needed in the scene."

NYC theatremakers are clearly wild about Wilder right now. In the last four years alone, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth have been revived on Broadway, while Teeth was also adapted into a new musical, Ethan Lipton's The Seat of Our Pants, off Broadway this past fall.

The Emporium, according to Melrose, mirrors the broad concept of The Skin of Our Teeth: telling the story of all of humanity through a few characters, with the audience filling out the world.

It also borrows Our Town's minimalist design aesthetic and, according to Tapper, expands on its central question. "If Our Town taught us we have everything we need in our everyday lives, as Wilder grew older, [he asks in The Emporium,] why doesn't it feel like it's enough?"

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Photo credit: The Emporium in rehearsal. (Photos by Allison Stock)