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The Awful Truth
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“The triumph of hope over experience”
– Dr. Johnson (and later, Oscar Wilde) on second marriages. 

Unknown Unknowns

What is the foundation of a lasting marriage?  Love?  Convenience?  Money?  And when a marriage doesn’t last, what gives us the courage to try again?

In 1921, Arthur Richman scored his first stage triumph with a romantic comedy about a second marriage, and challenge the play throws down still strikes a resonant chord.

Divorced New York socialite Lucy Warriner plans to tie the knot again: this time to Oklahoma oil man Dan Leeson. He is not of her circle, but he can certainly afford to keep her in it. Yet, before he—and moreover, his bluenosed aunt—will accept her, Lucy must quash a persistent rumor: that her cheating drove her first husband to divorce her. So she enlists her estranged ex-husband, Norman, to vouch for her. Of course.

Norman is game to reassure Dan—he takes full blame for the divorce —but privately, he and Lucy don't agree on the facts of the case. Indeed, disputing the details of their past, they find only one point of agreement: they are plainly still in love with one another. And yet…what about the “affair” that drove them apart? With both wry wit and innocent warmth, the play asks what chance friendship, love, or marriage could ever have if they depend on knowing the awful truth?

Bigger Than Truth
The truth is, truth is not a keystone in the play’s view of marriage. Bare facts are not suited to love: to strip away the petals of such a delicate flower is to wind up with nothing at all.  Faith is more the heart of a lasting union, and the challenge of trusting reverberates throughout The Awful Truth. Lucy’s friends don’t trust Norman, but neither do they trust that Lucy should marry Dan. Dan and his aunt don’t trust Lucy, though they do trust Norman. Norman doesn’t trust Lucy, though he may have faith in her. It may be that the ever-suspect Lucy is the only one who has faith in everyone.

In the early 20s, knowing where to have faith was not as easy as it had been even a decade before. At the end of an era of Progressive reforms, and after WWI, long-trusted institutions were no longer what they had been. America and the world fought the tides of a changing society, and The Awful Truth charts many of its currents.

Marriage rates spiked after the war, and so did divorce rates. Our central couple are statistics in both columns, while the play recognized marriage can be an economic transaction. Faith in that venerable institution is hardly secure.

Meanwhile, Lucy’s dilemma resonates with the decade’s shifting standards.  She is too independent to live in a hostile union, though she is willing to marry for money, yet in that pursuit, she stumbles over moral double-standard. That is to say, she is of her era, when women saw growing liberation, educational achievement, and enfranchisement (the 19th Amendment passed in 1920), but confronted unyielding limits on those freedoms. Her adaptation is that of a “modern” Lily Bart of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, as she exploits her charms without mercy. Unlike Lily, though, Lucy is given a way out: a union with someone who is her match, if they can both swallow enough of their youthful pride to accept one another. The maturity it takes to do so may be one of the most meaningful qualities the play urges us all to develop.

Other opposing moral and social standards are further mined for comedic but revealing effect, as well: Dan’s patronizing prudery, which rates women as either good or bad and assumes it can “bring Lucy ‘round,” crashes up against the sophisticated ease of Lucy’s friends, Eustace and Josephine Trent, who accept Lucy’s freedom just as they casually defy Prohibition (the 18th Amendment passed in 1919).  Here is the same conflict Fitzgerald sketches in The Great Gatsby: a black-and-white morality of the West posed against the sophisticated ambiguities of the East. The one is comforting, the other more knowing, and a choice between them is a choice between different types of happiness.

That confrontation is also a conflict between old and new money. The modern New Yorkers are still old guard, living on inherited wealth, while old-fashioned Dan is a new American, boasting a fortune from an oil boom that was itself tied to anti-trust activism and the 1911 breakup of a different venerable institution, Standard Oil. His morality is antique, but his democratic opportunism is a threat to the Establishment. (Truly, even this distinction is complex, as Eustace’s fortune was made by his grandfather, after the Civil War, say, and would have been considered New Money by the truly old New York families.)

Funnily Enough
In the vein of social comedy, somewhere between the convention-probing plays of Clyde Fitch and the screwball comedies of the Depression—Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story must jump to mind— Arthur Richman struck gold in The Awful Truth, which ran at Henry Miller’s Theatre on Broadway for 144 performances.  However, the play has rarely been staged since. In fact, the script was never published. Metropolitan’s director Michael Hardart found the original prompt book, with line changes in the margins, at the New York Public Library, and that is the script we present.

Even so, the story’s popularity has endured, as it was adapted four times for the screen: in a 1925 silent; a now lost 1929 “talkie,” starring Ina Claire, the original Lucy on Broadway; in a 1937 version, the best known, starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant and placed in the National Film Registry in 1996; and finally in the musical Let’s Do it Again! starring Jane Wyman in 1951.

In all of its iterations, The Awful Truth's story of an opportunistic marriage asks daunting questions of the social codes that hold us together and the suspicions that push us apart. In history’s repetitive habit, we confront the very same questions today, and perhaps the answer proposed by The Awful Truth—an answer found in a simple leap of faith—can still apply. And so, it is the story that begins Metropolitan’s 24th Season: the Season of Hope.


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- Jason A. Bocko and Alex Roe



Arthur Richman (1886 - 1944)

Raised on Manhattan's Upper East Side in comparatively comfortable circumstances, Arthur Richman brought a knowing perspective to the lives he describes in The Awful Truth.  He began his career as a short story writer, contributing to The Smart Set ("The Magazine of Cleverness"), among other journals, but had an inauspicious start as a playwright. Following a well-received one-act vaudeville Greensides, his comedy The Little Belgian opened in Philadelphia in 1918 only to be closed because of its unflattering portrayal of a British officer—ill-advised as America entered the WWI.

Richman served in the Chemical Warfare Service during the war, and began writing again at war’s end. He scored his first Broadway success with the comedy Not So Long Ago in 1920. His next play was an acerbic portrait of a weak-willed husband overwhelmed by the demands of his wife and daughter: The Ambush, which ran 98 performances, and remains his best known along with The Awful Truth. Later plays did not achieve as much renown as either of these earlier efforts, though he continued to write and be produced throughout his life.

He was president of the Society of American Dramatist and Composers from 1925 to 1927 and of the Author's League of America from 1928 to 1930, out of which grew the Screen Writers Guild we now know. He was director of the American Theater Wing War Service during the Second World War, though he himself died of a heart attack before the war’s end, in 1944.

BUY Now-Alex Roe


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