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People, not politics dominate �Idiot�s Delight� Despite its anti-war tone, the play�s strength is its all-too-flawed characters By BILL VARBLE Mail Tribune Poor Robert Sherwood. He starts with a big message and ends with great entertainment. "Again I see a burst of indignation accepted as a gag-fest," he wrote after the 1936 opening of his play "Idiot�s Delight." And no wonder. A double mindedness is still evident in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival�s stylish revival of Sherwood�s Pulitzer Prize-winner directed by guest director Peter Amster. We worry about Hitler and Mussolini, but they are presences in a shadowy backstory. Mostly, we laugh and hurt with the all-too-human characters in the foreground of what remains, despite itself, a romantic comedy. Sherwood used the same strategy he used earlier in "The Petrified Forest" (made into a movie with Humphrey Bogart the year "Idiot�s Delight" debuted). He creates a motley group of characters and puts them in a tight space, then invites us to watch what happens. This time it�s the less-than-grand Hotel Monte Gabriele in the Italian Alps across the borders from Austria and Switzerland. Travelers want to leave Mussolini�s Italy for different reasons but are forced to wait in the hotel�s cocktail lounge as Italy launches an air raid that surely means war. At the hotel is Harry Van (Michael Elich), a golden-tongued American vaudeville promoter, singer, hoofer and shill whose career has not been based on a high regard for the truth. With Harry are "Les Blondes," four leggy, airheaded showgirls he is managing on a low-rent tour of Europe. Other guests include a French labor leader and Marxist, two teddibly British honeymooners, a German scientist who may be forced to abandon a cure for cancer to make poison gas, a cynical arms dealer and his Russian mistress, Irene (ear-RAY-na). Irene is a beautiful blonde with a mysterious past, heavily furred in the White Russian way and not as young as she used to be. The story centers on the comical plight of Van�s second-rate troupe and its third-rate tour, now down to hoping to make just enough money to get back to the states. To defray part of his hotel bill, Van talks the hoteliers into letting the troupe do its act. The resulting show, which we understand is second-rate in the world of Harry Van, is first rate in real time, with Elich and the blondes hoofing and crooning � to our delight. But "Idiot�s Delight" is far from a musical in its ideas, and we soon see in action the fascist bully boys led by Capt. Locicero (Tony DeBruno), a man who possesses a basic decency but has put his conscience on hold in his personal accommodation with Mussolini�s regime. As the Italians launch a surprise attack on Paris, the idealistic Marxist (if that�s not an oxymoron) is taken out and shot. We see that the fate of these basically good people is not in their hands but those of evil forces. The personification of these forces is Quillery (James Newcomb), a shadowy arms dealer who always makes a profit. Sherwood was a pacifist in the 1920s but abandoned it when he realized it was useless against Hitler and Musolini. There�s an odd fascination, and an emotional jolt, in watching an anguished outcry against war � which Sherwood did not believe was inevitable � just three years before Hitler�s invasion of Poland would plunge the world into World War II. Yet what engages us most keenly is the romance between Van and Irene, good hearts under dubious exteriors. Elich and Nordli (in roles originated by Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne) in several scenes generate a believable chemistry. In the end they present a poignant image of Sherwood�s view of the human predicament: two basically decent people looking for love amid forces larger than themselves as all hell breaks loose around them. A member of the famed Algonquin round table, Sherwood worked at Vanity Fair and Life, wrote American propaganda in World War II, became a speech writer for Franklin D. Roosevelt and wrote screenplays for Hollywood. He was not a theatrical innovator, but he wrote plays of ideas filled with big questions � and witty comedy. A lifetime removed from his world, the ideas still resonate, and still take back seat to the human comedy. William Bloodgood�s set and Mara Blumenfield�s costumes evoke elegantly the vanished modernism of the pre-war era. The OSF�s Ursula Meyer worked with actors on some two dozen accents. The play runs about two hours 45 minutes with an intermission. TEMPO: Libraries | Movies | Museums | Restaurant Review | Restaurant Review Archive | Support Groups | Tempo Home Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2002 Mail Tribune, Inc.