Critical Overview

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Idiot’s Delight was a hit when it first appeared on Broadway in 1936. The play appeared at a time when Robert E. Sherwood’s career was at its creative and popular peak, and its stars, Alfred Lunt and his wife, Lynn Fontanne, were two of the most popular Broadway stars of the 1930s and 1940s. Sherwood had come naturally to writing for the stage, having been a drama critic and film critic and having closely associated with such successful Broadway writers as George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly as a part of the social group that gathered regularly at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City throughout the 1920s. Sherwood’s first professional play, The Road to Rome, a clever version of the story of Hannibal’s assault on Rome, was a smash hit in 1927, establishing Sherwood as a talented, reliable playwright and giving him the chance to leave his position as literary editor for Life magazine. After that, Sherwood’s name became a constant and familiar sight on Broadway marquees with a string of clever social comedies and love stories, each alluding in one way or another to the horrors of war.

The 1935 drama The Petrified Forest was the first to show Sherwood at his philosophical, serious best, and it anticipated the structure that was to appear again in his later work, Idiot’s Delight. In it, a group of strangers passing through a Nevada gas station are detained and threatened by a sinister presence, an escaped gangster. In Modern American Playwrights, Jean Gould refers to an anonymous critic of the time who accused Sherwood of ‘‘perpetuating hokum of the highest type on the American public.’’ Gould also includes a reply by Burnes Mantle, who praised the playwright as ‘‘a melodramatist who, in place of pretending to despise the hokum of our theatre, boldly embraces it with noble purpose and to fine effect.’’ Gould goes on to add her own thoughts about the subject: ‘‘Hokum or no, The Petrified Forest was chilling melodrama bordering on true tragedy, and was an overnight success when it appeared on Broadway in early January, 1935.’’

If The Petrified Forest prepared audiences to accept Sherwood as a serious, committed playwright of ideas, it was Idiot’s Delight that fulfilled that promise. The play had the commercial elements that made the clever comedies of Sherwood’s earlier career appeal to the masses, including songs and music and romance, performed by the ever-popular Lunts. Sherwood himself recorded his responses to reviews of the play in his diary, as noted in John Mason Brown’s biography The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood—Mirror to His Times, 1896–1939:

Mar. 25. Read Notices. First I read was Atkinson’s in the Times & it was lukewarm. The others seemed not much better. Disappointed. Anderson’s in the Eve. Journal was marvelous, & so was Lockridge’s in The Sun. General opinion was that all notices were superlatively good for box-office—but except for the last two mentioned they’re far from satisfying me. . . . why do they deliberately close their ears to everything of importance that is said in a comedy? You’d think it was a crime to state unpleasant truths in an entertaining way.

In spite of Sherwood’s disappointment and perhaps owing to the worsening of the conditions in Europe that he predicted in Idiot’s Delight, the play grew in critical esteem during its run. He was rewarded for daring to state ‘‘unpleasant truths’’ with the Pulitzer Prize for drama for that year. He also won the Pulitzer for his next play, Abe Lincoln in Illinois , which showed the president’s growth from a...

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pacifist in the 1840s to the commander in chief of the Union Army in the 1860s. Sherwood’s third Pulitzer was for the next play in succession,There Shall Be No Night, a pro-war play that served to fulfill the doubts about pacifism that began showing themselves in The Petrified Forest.

During World War II, Sherwood worked for the government, and after the war he found that his award-winning plays held no more interest than dated newspapers. Though his craftsmanship has never been questioned, his artistry has never been overtly praised either. Without being able to relate Idiot’s Delight to current events, audiences can only see it as a slick piece of antiwar propaganda. SherI wood’s plays have continually appeared in anthologies of best-loved plays because they capture a particularly ambivalent aspect of the American culture, but they seldom appear in anthologies of bestwritten plays.

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