Oddity of the Week: Horse Eats Hat
Created | Updated Jan 27, 2013
The play's the thing.
Horse Eats Hat
The horse ate what? Oh, it's a play. By Orson Welles, no less.
Back during the Great Depression, the Federal Theatre Project, a part of the Works Projects Administration (WPA), kept actors and other theatrical people off the breadlines in the US. Many, many people were thankful to FDR. Nervous anti-communists weren't: they thought all those plays were suspiciously left-wing.
They couldn't object too much to Horse Eats Hat, though: 21-year-old phenom Welles and his troupe had simply served up a farce adaptation of a French play called Un chapeau de paille d'Italie. It played to packed houses for a couple of months in the fall of 1936. Not a bad way to cheer everybody up.
The plot? We're not sure. There was this guy, see, and his horse ate this lady's hat, and. . . We assume hijinks ensued. It was probably a laugh riot in 1936. But you can't be intellectual all the time.
