THE STORY: In Richard Watts Jr.'s words: "…concerns the misadventures of an American in the South of France. His wife has just gone off with a black skin-diver, and he is trying to be very fair and non-racial about it, although with indifferent results. His next-door neighbor is a bikini-clad American girl, who drops in chiefly to tell him pointless stories. She is also willing to comfort him, but his main interest is dramatizing himself as interchangeably forgiving and vengeful. The other visitors include a thief and a policeman who, being French, patriotically takes the French thief's side against him. The fatuous psychiatrist shows up, as does an impossible American who thinks he understands other races. The wife and her two black friends arrive, one the skin-diver who puts on a bogusly genial kind of minstrel act, the other a romantic type who makes love poetically. They are a well-assorted and, on the whole, an amusing set of people." And, in fact, perhaps the most singular, hilarious and ingratiating group of characters to be encountered on the American stage since
You Can’t Take It With You made history of a similar kind in its own time.
