Harry Kurnitz

A new comedy. From L'idiote by Marcel Achard

A shot in the dark

On Broadway, Julie Harris played the good hearted and guileless child of nature who is hauled before the magistrate on a charge of murder, having been found unconscious, nude, and clutching a gun, with her lover dead beside her. What is most shocking to the magistrate is the complete frankness with which she describes her life as a parlor maid and her affairs with both the dead chauffeur and her aristocratic employer. She is so ingenious that the magistrate, at the risk of his juridical neck, decides that she could not have committed the murder. The investigation expands to include both the aristocratic employer, who cannot answer yes or no in less than a paragraph and whose own polysyllables make him yawn, and his wife who descended in direct line from Attilla the Hun and looks it. She has been having an affair with her husband's best friend. The magistrate finds the right culprit and the open hearted little parlor maid offers herself to him as a present.

A Comedy in Three Acts

A Shot in the Dark

One More, with feeling tells the story of egomaniacal and temperamental Victor Fabian a conductor and his wife Dolly a harpist who acts on her husband's behalf, presenting his impossible demands to the symphony's backers, only to then find him dallying with a considerably younger musician. When Dolly decides to leave him, Victor's conducting suffers and the orchestra needs her back. His agent, Max Archer, tries to get him a new contract, but young Wilbur, son of the orchestra's patron saint, insists to Victor's horror that any agreement must include a performance of his mother's favorite song, John Philip Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever. Rather than return, Dolly wants a divorce so she can marry Dr. Richard Hilliard, a physicist. An angry Victor blurts out that to be divorced, two people must first be married. It turns out colleagues only assumed Victor and Dolly were husband and wife, and they never actually tied the knot. Victor won't grant a quick marriage and equally quick divorce unless she agrees to live with him for three more weeks. A frustrated Dolly tells both she just wants to live alone. She applauds from the audience as Victor, with great reluctance, launches the orchestra into a rousing Stars and Stripes Forever.

Harry Kurnitz

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