About the Play:

Winner of the Best Foreign Play by New York Drama Critics Circle

The Madwoman of Chaillot (English-language version of La Folle de Chaillot) is a full-length drama by Jean Giraudoux, adapted by Maurice Valency. A group of corrupt businessmen scheme to extract oil from under the streets of post-war Paris. "The Madwoman of Chaillot" and her eccentric, oddball friends soon come to realize that the city might well be ruined by these evil men – men who seek only wealth and power. Who will prevail? Especially recommended for school and contest use.

The Madwoman of Chaillot is a good-vs.-evil comic fable set in the Cafe de l'Alma in the Chaillot district of post-war Paris. It is said the Great French Writers of the 17th Century, Molière, Racine, and La Fontaine, used to frequent this cafe. But these days a group of power hungry businessmen are meeting. They include the Prospector, the President, and the Baron, and they are planning to dig up Paris to get at the oil which they believe lies beneath its streets. Their grandiose plans come to the attention of Countess Aurelia, the benignly eccentric madwoman of the title. She is an aging idealist who is ostensibly not normal in her mind but who is soon shown to be the very essence of practical worldly goodness and common sense. With everything she holds dear suddenly under threat, the Countess unites with a rag-tag group of local artists, vagabonds, and dreamers to take Chaillot back. At a tea party attended by other "mad" women of Paris, she has brought together representatives of the despoilers of the earth and wreckers of its happiness, and has them tried and condemned to extermination. In a scene which mounts into the realms of high poetic comedy, she sends the culprits one by one, lured by the scent of oil and undreamed-of riches, into a bottomless pit which opens out of her cellar. The exodus of the wicked is accompanied by another and more beautiful miracle: Joy, justice and love return to the world again. The Madwoman of Chaillot was Jean Giraudoux's last play, arguably his masterpiece; it holds greed up for rebuke, making it relevant for any era.

La Folle de Chaillot was written in 1943, during the Nazi occupation of France. After finishing it, Jean Giraudoux laid it aside, refusing to allow it to be performed during the occupation. It was first performed in a free France at the Théâtre de l'Athénée in 1945, after the death of the author in February of that same year. The English-language adaptation by Maurice Valency was produced in 1950 on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre as The Madwoman of Chaillot. The show has become a popular choice for school and community theatre productions.

Cast: 8 female, 17 male plus a number of minor roles, some without lines (25 total)

What people say:

"A deeply humane and hopeful comic fable." — The New York Times

"One of the most interesting and rewarding plays to have been written within the last twenty years." — The New York Drama Critics Circle

About the Playwright:

Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944) was a French playwright, novelist, and diplomat whose witty, originally expressed works in an impressionistic style helped free French theatre from the restrictions of realism. He wrote fifteen internationally acclaimed plays, most initially staged by the actor-director Louis Jouvet.

Maurice Valency (1903-1996) was an American playwright, author, critic and professor of drama, an erudite man of the theater best-known for his successful Broadway adaptations of award-winning plays by Jean Giraudoux and Friedrich Duerrenmatt. He taught at Brooklyn College, Columbia University as a professor of dramatic literature and the Juilliard School, where he served as director of academic studies. He was also a member of the New York bar and spoke seven languages.