Word: chaillot
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...Wedding (winner of the Critics' Award) might have trouble proving itself a play, it too could take pride in much of its writing. Better still, both these very individual works, like such recent others as A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman and The Madwoman of Chaillot, became genuine box-office hits...
Even some of the men are coming to prefer the Rosalinds to the Juliets. This is surely all for the best. Every woman knows that as the Mad Woman of Chaillot said, "There's nothing so wrong in this world that a sensible woman can't set it right in the course of an afternoon...
...Enchanted (adapted from the French of the late Jean Giraudoux by Maurice Valency; produced by David Lowe & Richard Davidson), whatever its weaknesses as a play, is frequently enchanting. A fantasy, as was Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot, it uses a much slighter and more tremulous fable. Instead of grandly and wackily turning Paris upside down, it delicately turns existence inside out. Half the play merely suggests and evokes, like music; even the solider half is mostly talk...
...when she learns that her friends are unhappy because the "pimps" are taking over. (The pimps, explains the Rag-picker, are the parasites and non-productive members of society--presidents and vice-presidents of corporations, to be specific but non-inclusive,) The Countess sets out to rid Chaillot of such wickedness, which she manages to do in short order, there being "nothing so wrong in this world that a sensible woman can't set it right in the course of an afternoon." How she accomplishes this, and the introduction it affords to the Countess' world, is the substance...
...Odets and Saroyans--and other dealers in messages and whimsy--could do well to study Giraudoux' method of wedding them. "The Madwoman of Chaillot" has its share of yuks all right, but the best parts are not those which provoke loud laughter but rather a silent 'yes' when the Madwoman--with the perception of the insane and the logic of the child-like--cuts sharply through to the truth of the matter. The healthy heart-beat of humanity can be heard in this play...