On 27 November 1938, Orson Welles's production of "Clarence" was broadcast on "Mercury Theatre on the Air," CBS-Radio. Already dated by the time of Welles's broadcast, Booth Tarkington's play, written shortly after The Magnificent Ambersons had earned him a Pulitzer prize, made Alfred Lunt a star on Broadway in 1921, opposite the young Helen Hayes. Lunt later became famous on both sides of the Atlantic as part of the "Lunt and Fontanne" duo (with his wife Lynn Fontanne, a Gertrude Lawrence type). They pioneered the overlapping dialogue technique later favored by Welles and the Mercury.
Fontanne and Lunt worked together in 27 productions. Of her acting style with Lunt, British broadcasting personality Arthur Marshall - having seen her in Caprice St James's Theatre (1929) - observed: "In the plays of the period, actors waited to speak until somebody else had finished; the Lunts turned all that upside down. They threw away lines, they trod on each others words, they gabbled, they spoke at the same time. They spoke, in fact, as people do in ordinary life."
The Mercury broadcast is now believed to be lost. Here's a review of a 1985 revival of the play:
IN its time, Booth Tarkington's ''Clarence'' was a major Broadway success, the show that transformed Alfred Lunt into a star. Seeing the Mirror Repertory Company revival, one wonders how the play made it through the 1919 season - to say nothing about those ecstatic reviews.
''Clarence'' is intended to be an eccentric comedy of the kind that years later was honed to a fine edge by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman in ''You Can't Take It With You.'' In the case of the Tarkington play, the humor is thin deep.
The farfetched plot deals with a scientist (Ivar Brogger) who takes a job as a handyman to a rich suburban family. All the women in the household fall in love with Clarence while all the men, including Clarence, fall in love with the governess, Sabra Jones. The dialogue, too much of it based on malapropisms, is as archaic as the characters. Clarence is the only person of even marginal interest.