THE WOMEN by Clare Boothe Luce

OLYMPIA, WA (10-9-19) — The Harlequin Theater (4th Ave, downtown) is a small venue (seating: 212) very professionally constructed and managed performing arts (primarily plays) center serving up original productions and local casts, a gemstone to Olympia’s downtown mix of businesses and spiraling gentrification. Yet they cater to the little people as well…even the least of these, by offering admission for whatever you can afford to pay on the first Wednesday of each production’s run. That’s the kind of deal only Dad’s usually make. The Women’s period apparel (set in the 1930’s) was exquisitely rendered and in abundance. The cast was large and well rehearsed. The play itself was richer in character development and biting repartee than plot/suspense as farce’s usually are. The language was frank–suitable for teenagers and adults capable of following it’s rapid rat-a-tat-tat pace. The cast were all quite animated and attractive in their bearing. It was an insider’s peek into the lives of the privileged and swells of the time engaged in their intrigue and petty gossip–all captured in ~2.5 hours on stage instead of the ~2.5 years of the storyline. Men are constantly referenced in the play but, never seen. Luce was born Ann Clare Boothe in New York City on 3-10-03. Her parents were not married and would separate in 1912. Her father, a sophisticated man and a brilliant violinist, instilled in his daughter az love of literature, if not music. She attended school in Garden City and Tarrytown, New York, graduating first in her class in 1919 at 16. Her ambitious mother’s initial plan was to become an actress. Clare understudied Mary Pickford on Broadway at age 10, and had a small part in Thomas Edison’s 1915 movie, THE HEART OF A WAIF. After a tour of Europe with her mother and stepfather, Dr. Albert E. Austin, whom Ann Boothe married in 1919, she became interested in the women’s suffrage movement. Highly intelligent, ambitious, and blessed with a deceptively fragile blonde beauty, the young Clare soon abandoned ideological feminism to pursue other interests. She wed George Tuttle Brokaw, millionaire heir to a New York clothing fortune on 8-10-23 at the age of 20. They had one daughter, Ann Clare Brokaw (1924 – 1944). According to Boothe, Brokaw was a hopeless alcoholic, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1929. One can’t help but notice how the play reflect’s the arc of Luce’s own life, the characters plucked from her acquaintances and familiars, farce being the main cloak lending anonymity to the bereaved. Own 11-23-35, she married Henry Luce, the publisher of TIME, LIFE, and FORTUNE. She thereafter called herself Clare Boothe Luce. On 1-11-44, her only child, Anne Clare Brokaw, a 19-year-old senior at Stanford University, was killed in an automobile accident. As a result of the tragedy, Luce explored psychotherapy and Catholicism. She became an ardent essayist and lecturer in celebration of her faith and became known as a charismatic and forceful public speaker. Politically, Luce was a leading conservative in later life and was well known for her anti-communism. In her youth, she briefly aligned herself with the liberalism of President Franklin Roosevelt, but later became an outspoken critic of Roosevelt. She later became the first American woman appointed to a major ambassadorship post abroad. A writer with considerable powers of invention and wit, Luce published STUFFED SHIRTS, a promising volume of short stories in 1931. Much of Luce’s famously acid wit (“No good deed goes unpunished”, “Widowhood is a fringe benefit of marriage”, “A hospital is no place to be sick”) can be traced back to the days when, as a wealthy young divorcee in the early 1930’s, she became a caption writer at Vogue and then, associate editor of Vanity Fair. She not only edited the works of such great humorists as P. G. Wodenhouse and Corey Ford but contributed to many comic pieces of her own. She published numerous articles during World War II as a journalist with LIFE magazine. Her real talent, however, was as a playwright. After the failure of her initial stage effort, the marital melodrama ABIDE WITH ME (1935), she rapidly followed up with a satirical comedy, THE WOMEN. Deploying a cast of no fewer than 40 actresses who discussed men in often scorching language, it became a Broadway smash in 1936 and, three years later, a successful Hollywood movie. Toward the end of her life, Luce claimed that for half a century, she had steadily received royalties from productions of THE WOMEN all around the world. Later in the 1930’s, she wrote two more successful, but less durable plays, also both made into movies: KISS THE BOYS GOODBYE and MARGIN FOR ERROR. The latter work “presented an all-out attack on the Nazi’s racist philosophy”. Its opening night in Princeton on 10-14-39, was attended by Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann. Otto Preminger directed and starred in both the Broadway production and screen adaptation.