Idiot’s Delight

Idiot’s Delight, the 1936 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, tells the story of a young English couple on their honeymoon, a French socialist, a German scientist, a munitions magnate, the inscrutable but magnetic Russian Irene, and the vulgar but lovable American Harry Van and his blonde-bombshells who are thrown together in a small winter resort in the Italian Alps on the eve of WWII. The play throws into ironic relief the individual human being who, having brought upon himself the obscene idiocy of wholesale destruction by war, wakes up to find that he can do nothing more than make a futile gesture against the forces he has set in action.