Word: amphitryon
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Best skit in Washington's famed Gridiron Club show this winter was laid on cloud-bedecked Mt. Olympus (a setting borrowed from Lunt & Fontanne's successful play, Amphitryon 38). In it Mercury reported to Jupiter on the affairs of the Earth below, and Jupiter told Mercury how he ran Olympus. Excerpt...
Even those who did not know the legend of Amphitryon*-whose wife Alcmena was seduced by Jupiter-expected this because they knew Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Spirited Aphrodisiantics, urbanely conducted infidelities are the hallmark of Lunt-Fontanne plays, which take on added zest from the well-known fact that Actors Lunt and Fontanne have been contentedly married for the last 15 years...
...Play. Amphitryon 38, adapted for the Lunts by Samuel Nathaniel Behrman from the French farce of Jean Hippolyte Giraudoux, is approximately the 38th dramatic version of the Theban legend of how all-powerful Zeus (Roman Jupiter) had to assume the mental as well as the physical aspects of Amphitryon before Alcmena would bed him. The Lunts studied the play, which they were quick to see contained one of their favorite situations, for several months before trying it out last June in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Later they took it to Baltimore, Washington and Cleveland, to whose critics the play...
...stylish stylus, a mort of Jovian musing, some heavy-handed Olympian plotting-and the Lunts. Just as all but the extremely myopic soon discovered that the display of buttockry in the startling opening set was a plaster hoax, so none but the most zealous Lunt-Fontanne champions found Amphitryon 38 the perfect play...
...Presumably to simplify matters for a nonclassical audience, half the cast of Amphitryon, 38, has Greek names, Half-Roman, while Guild programs listed Alcmena as Alkmena, a simplified version of neither...