The Madwoman of Chaillot

The Charles Playhouse has produced an adaptation of The Madwoman of Chaillot by Jean Giraudoux that is remarkable for both its lightness and its sensitivity. It never bogs down in convoluted intellectual satire, as can easily happen when a less skillful company tackles Giraudoux; yet it does sacrifice ideas for either liveliness or wistfulness. Idea, or more specifically, idealism, is not buried. Its threads are carefully woven together in the first act and triumphantly knotted in the second. Evil falls victim to its own greed, love blooms again, and innocence reawakens.

The white knight, the matchmaker, and the childlike philosopher, is Countess Aurelie, Ghailot's elderly madwoman. While sitting at a Parisian cafe, Aurelie overhears a company president, a baron, and a prospector discussing plans to tap the seas of oil that, they are sure, lie under Paris's streets. The Countess is at first natively ignorant of the uses of oil, but when she learns of the industrialists' evil lust for power, and is told how oil can give them that power, she crushes them, madly. She tries them, in absentia, condemns them, and executes them by luring all the advocates of evil down an endless stairway.

The exuberance that the actors transmit to us makes the fairy tale's happy ending even more delightful. But Giraudoux's philosophical conclusion is not sanguine. His satire is too sharp, his villains too sinister, to lull us into sleepy security. Though evil may have been destroyed in the fantasy, Giraudox reminds us that, in real life, it is still attacking us, and that only the mad remain innocent. Love, like innocence, is elusive. Aurelie moans for her long-lost lover, Adolphe Bertaut, yet when he and all of the world's Adolphe Bertaut's offer themselves to her, she cries, "Too late!" In the world of fantasy, love triumphs, but in the real world it has already been lost.

Giraudoux has not constructed characters with well defined personalities. Each character is circumscribed by an idea fixe. Aurelie always searches for her lost bon scarf. The president constantly seeks money and power. The third dimension of personality must be supplied by the cast, and the Charles's actors, with no exceptions, build their roles with imagination and humor.

Dorothy Pattern, the madwoman, plays her madness in the first act as though everyone else were crazy. She is a calm, inquisitive, if somewhat wacky, innocent here. But she rises with power and determination in the second act to lead her good allies to victory over the forces of darkness.

Tom Toner gives the Ragpicker extraordinary fire in his mock defense, in fact a satirical indictment, of the oil seekers, and Earl Montgomery as the president scowls and plots so vilely that we are ready to cheer with the inhabitants of Chailot when he and his fellow conspirators are destroyed. Lynn Milgrim and Paul Schmidt make attractively childlike lovers, whose only reason for being in the play is to love each other. Everyone, down to the flowers-girl and the doorman, performs with grace and wit.

Director Michael Murray achieves the difficult and peculiar French balance between comedy and intellectuality. His direction prevents side-spiting distractions from Giruadoux's pointed satire, and, partly through effective cutting of several long speeches, maintains lightness of faint. He touches, but doesn't overwhelm, the last act with shades of the pathetic and the ridiculous. The resuits are sublime.