Ekleticgoodies

THE CAMPBELL PLAYHOUSE

"THEODORA GOES WILD"

written by

Mary McCarthy and Sidney Buchman

Produced and Scripted by Orson Welles

Starring Orson Welles

PLOT SUMMARY:

Theodora Lynn is a Sunday school teacher and former church organist raised by two spinster aunts, Mary and Elsie Lynn . She also happens to be, under the pen name Caroline Adams, the secret author of a bestselling book that has the straitlaced Lynnfield Literary Circle in an uproar. When it is serialized in the local newspaper, the Circle, led by outraged busybody Rebecca Perry , forces Jed Waterbury to stop printing the salacious installments.

Theodora travels to New York City on the pretext of visiting her uncle John , but actually to see her publisher, Arthur Stevenson . Though Stevenson reassures an anxious Theodora that only he and his secretary know her identity, his wife Ethel pressures him into an introduction, which the book's illustrator, Michael Grant , overhears.

Intrigued, Michael invites himself to dinner with the Stevensons and Theodora. Theodora becomes annoyed when Michael smugly assumes that she is a teetotaler, so she orders a whiskey. As the night goes on, she becomes drunk. So does Ethel, forcing Arthur to take his wife home and leaving Theodora alone with Michael. When he makes a pass at her, she panics and flees, much to his amusement.

He tracks her down to her hometown and blackmails her into hiring him as a gardener, scandalizing her aunts and providing Rebecca Perry plenty to gossip about. Michael declares that he is going to break Theodora out of her confining routine, ignoring her protests that she likes her life just the way it is. Despite herself, she enjoys herself very much when Michael makes her go berrypicking and fishing with him.

...excerpted form wikipedia

The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a show featuring the acclaimed New York drama company founded by Orson Welles and John Houseman. In its brief run, it featured an impressive array of talents, including Agnes Moorehead, Bernard Herrmann, and George Coulouris. The show is famous for its notorious War of the Worlds broadcast, but the other shows in the series are relatively unknown.

The show first broadcast on CBS and CBC in July 1938. It ran without a sponsor until December of that year, when it was picked up byCampbell’s Soup and renamed The Campbell Playhouse.

Approximate play time of 1 hour