Is Idiot’s a Delight?

A revival of Idiot’s Delight is in town? I’m there! Yes, the gritty little, never-say-die, aptly-named Vital Theatre Company is presenting an all too rare revival of Robert E. Sherwood’s 1936 Pulitzer Prize-winning play — and I wasn’t about to miss it, for this is a play that I wanted to re-examine.

Idiot’s Delight was a big hit of the 1935-1936 season, running an aggregate 300 performances interrupted by a vacation for its legendary stars, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. He played Harry Van, a minor-league entertainer backed up by six lovely ladies, while she was the un-surnamed Irene, a mysterious Russian with whom Harry swears he had a one-night stand in Omaha some years before. Irene denies it.

The two meet in 1936 in Italian-occupied Austria in a resort that’s trying awfully hard to be ritzy but is enduring hard times. There aren’t too many guests in the place: two British honeymooners, the Cherrys; Dr. Waldersee, who must get back to Germany for some time-dependent studies with rats that just might cure cancer; Quillery, a Frenchman who’s furious at the political system and is a fan of Lenin. He’s especially angry with Achille Weber, a munitions dealer who’s enjoying some good fortune, not only financially but also because he’s with the alluring Irene.

Of course, by contemporary standards, that’s a great number of guests — and there are plenty more members of the cast, too. But you’ve noticed that Sherwood conveniently provided representatives of America, France, England, Germany, and Russia, and much of the play involves talk about war. Too much talk for the likes of Lajos Egri, who wrote one of the best how-to-write-a-play books ever: The Art of Dramatic Writing. (Read it!) Egri sure isn’t intimidated by Sherwood’s Pulitzer for he makes many a feisty reference to Idiot’s Delight in his tome. He opines that, in this one instance, Sherwood joined playwrights who “insist we treat their works as plays, but we can’t do that, no matter how hard we try, just as we can’t compare the mental capacity of a child to Einstein.” Wow! Them’s fightin’ words!

That’s only the beginning. Later, Egri calls Idiot’s
Delight “a classic example of how not to write a play. The premise is, ‘Do armament manufacturers stir up trouble and war?’ The author’s answer is yes. The premise is unfortunate. It is superficial.” He goes on to say,
“There are no people in this play, no people who really matter…characters wander in and out with no particular motivation. They enter, introduce themselves, and leave because the author wishes to introduce something else. They re-enter for some artificial reason, tell what they think and how they feel, and wander out again so that the next batch may come on.”

I didn’t much disagree with all of this when I read Idiot’s Delight. Around the same time, I saw the 1963 TV series that was loosely based on the play: Harry’s Girls starred Larry Blyden as Harry Burns, who worked with three, not six, girls. (One of them, Dawn Nickerson, was a lead in the Off-Broadway hit Riverwind and was also Nancy Dussault’s understudy in Do Re Mi). Here, the story was trimmed to deal just with the difficulties that American entertainers had when dealing with European bureaucracy and its audiences. Irene was dropped and so was the background of the war because the nation wasn’t at war then — or, at least, it didn’t realize that it was.

In the days before DVDs, videocassettes, and Turner Classic Movies, I never ran into the 1939 movie version of Idiot’s Delight, which had two different endings filmed — one for American audiences and one for those
overseas. The American ending was a happier one, for though the bombs were bursting in air, Harry Van and Irene (now surnamed Fellara) did wind up with each other.

But you see what a fascinating property this is. How many works can claim a Pulitzer, a film version with two different endings, a TV series and — yes — a musical? That one came into my life in 1983 when Alan Jay Lerner
and Charles Strouse wrote Dance a Little Closer. My buddy Martin Erskine was working on the production and invited me to one of the workshop presentations at 890 Broadway. I was thrilled to attend, for my hearing the soundtrack of Lerner and Loewe’s Gigi and the original cast album of the team’s My Fair Lady when I was 14 spurred me on to what has proved to be a lifelong love of musical theater. Fair Lady was the first musical I ever saw and, 13 weeks later, Bye Bye Birdie — a Strouse show — was my third. So these guys were two of my early heroes.

Imagine how I felt when the afternoon began with Lerner, wearing those white gloves to conceal the fingernails he used to bite down to the quick and beyond, nervously looking at those assembled and quietly announcing, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Migawd! Alan Jay Lerner is apologizing to me? What is this show going to be like?

Whatever it was, it’s wasn’t quite Idiot’s Delight. Lerner had transformed the time period of the tale to the present day and made it clear that we were on the brink of World War III. Now, Harry Aikens (Len Cariou) has three girls called The Delights. After they do their opening number for the resort audience in the Austrian Alps, he begins musing on Cindy, a woman with whom he once spent a night — and wouldn’t you know that, not five minutes later, she walks into the place?

Already, it was clear that Lerner wasn’t at his best. The play has a terrific moment when Irene begins to let down her guard with Achille and starts talking in different languages and accents to show that she’s been everywhere. What an idea for a song! But if Lerner and Strouse wrote it, it sure wasn’t in that day or for the previews or the one performance that the show would play at the Minskoff. I have to wonder if they did at least consider this moment for musicalization but dropped it because their leading lady couldn’t manage it. One might ask, ‘Why didn’t they hire someone who could?’ — but Lerner wouldn’t have wanted anyone other than Liz Robertson as his female lead, given that she was the last of many Mrs. Lerners.

I doubt that we’ll ever see a revival of the musical but there sure is one thing in it that’s relevant in 2004, as George W. Bush is pushing for a new amendment to the constitution: Lerner changed the Cherrys of the original script to Charles Castleton and Edward Dunlop, two gay men who see the end of the world coming and want to get married. While Strouse originally wrote the melody of this song for the opening number of Applause (“It’s a bomb; it’s a hit; if they wanted entertainment, this is it”), Lerner took it and wrote “I Don’t Know,” in which a cleric who’s asked to preside over the marriage ceremony expresses his doubts.

Anyway, I went to the Vital Theatre production, which had on its poster such sentiments as “searing political passions,” “overwhelming wit,” and “dancing blonde bombshells” (these were whittled down to two). I have to
say that, after seeing the play all these years later, I’m more on Egri’s side than that of the Pulitzer Prize committee. Still, I’m tremendously grateful to Vital and director Julie Hamberg for giving the play a most spirited production. Ron McClary and Aimee Hayes are marvelous as Harry and Irene. And Michael Huber as a waiter is such an odd but imposing presence that, the moment he identified himself as Dumpsty, I saw most everyone in the audience
check his program to see who this striking looking individual was.

The title of the play? It comes from Irene. She compares the threat of war to the game Idiot’s Delight, which she says the devil plays — a game that “never means anything and never ends.” That may ultimately be a good description of the play, as well.

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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@aol.com]