nytheatre.com review

by Stan Richardson · April 18, 2004
http://www.nytheatre.com/nytheatre/idiots.htm  

now at http://www.nytheatre.com/nytheatre/archweb/arch2004_g.htm

The most immediately delightful feature of Vital Theatre Company’s solid and engaging revival of Robert E. Sherwood’s 1936 Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy, Idiot’s Delight, is that the audience feels thrust into the center of the action—in the middle of the cocktail lounge of the Hotel Monte Gabriele, a lackluster resort in the Italian Alps, near the Swiss, Austrian, and Bavarian borders. On this particular winter afternoon, it is filled with a group of travelers of various nationalities whose train trip across the border to Switzerland has been truncated due to substantial information that world war is imminent. Which country will initiate, who will be fighting with whom and to what end, are questions on everyone’s minds as they watch the nearby airfield for Italian bomber planes for a sign.

But, this being a comedy, coexisting with the dread is a mostly affable (and humorous) awkwardness amongst this collection of strangers, which includes: Mr. and Mrs. Cherry, enchanted honeymooners from England; Doctor Waldersee, a German scientist who is near finding a cure for cancer; Quillery, a Communist labor organizer from France; Irene, a Russian countess of iffy descent and her companion, Achille Weber, a French arms merchant who has inside knowledge of the impending war; and Harry Van, an American impresario/confidence man, who with his girls, Beulah and Shirley, is touring abroad a very mediocre lounge act.

Though Sherwood’s politics are expressly pacific, questioning the integrity behind and usefulness of war, his deeper concern seems to be about fully participating in life amidst conflict and ambiguity, both on an interpersonal and a worldwide scale. How do these people react to their limited loci of control—petrification or adaptation?

The plot focuses on Harry Van and Irene, whom he could swear he met and fell in love with ten years before when their separate acts were briefly touring in tandem in middle America. He has modestly persevered by way of whiskey and a deep sense of irony, whereas she—black-haired and no longer blonde, with a convincing Russian accent and the works—has taken a more circuitous route of survival: total reinvention.

Director Julie Hamberg and her gifted ensemble get all the laughs honestly and without resorting to caricature, slowly revealing the play’s warm and hopeful heart. The cast is uniformly authentic, affecting, and endearingly theatrical. Amid the fine performances, Ron McClary and Aimée Hayes stand out, as Harry and Irene, whose scenes together are poignant and engrossing. Roberto Sanchez-Camus’ set design deserves much credit for helping to create the audience’s immersion described above, as do Carrie Yacono’s lighting and Suada Perezic’s sound.

Not frequently produced and certainly not with such great care and capability, Vital Theatre Company’s production of Idiot’s Delight is a somber and joyful, smart and funny comfort, particularly in these troublous times.

Listing:  Vital Theatre Company presents a revival of Robert E. Sherwood's 1936 Pulitzer Prize play, Idiot's Delight. It tells the story of a group of people who are caught in a small winter resort in the Italian Alps on the eve of World War II. The characters include: a young English couple on their honeymoon, a French socialist, a German scientist, a munitions magnate, an inscrutable Russian lady, and a vulgar but American hoofer named Harry Van. The press release says, "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."

Shown above are Ron McClary and Aimee Hayes in a scene from Idiot's Delight.