The Tunnel of Love is a three-act play with five scenes and a prologue, written by Joseph Fields and Peter De Vries, adapted from the latter's 1954 novel.
The action is concerned with the efforts of a married couple to conceive a child and the complications that set in when they decide to try adoption.
Although a box office success, largely due to the star Tom Ewell, it failed to garner any award nominations.
When Ewell left after a full year playing the lead, the role was taken over by Johnny Carson for six weeks, in his only Broadway stage appearance.
Popular with regional and community theaters during 1957 through 1959, its thin plot seems to have precluded much interest in revivals during subsequent years.
Augie delivers a self-pitying speech to the empty set, trying to explain to the absent Isolde just how this all started a year ago... (Blackout) An afternoon in June.
Dick phones the Westport Arms and makes a date with Terry McBain, a young libretist he knows.
Isolde and Augie argue about the precise timing of lovemaking that Dr Vancouver's fertility program requires.
His partially-clothed state and the bottle in his hand make a poor impression on her, as does his reference, Dick Pepper, who comes back in and immediately suggests a get together.
Augie gives her the check and she assures him they won't meet again, as she will leave for New Zealand after the birth.
Alice, having had delivered the Pepper's latest baby sometime ago, fetches Dick back home to help care for it.
Miss McCracken appears at the door, to remind Augie that the Poole's are on probation and will be checked on regularly for a year.
They reconcile; when Isolde suddenly asks Augie to run out and buy some Chinese food, he realises she must be pregnant.
De Vries wrote his own script for a stage version of his novel in 1955, which the Theatre Guild was reported to be considering for production in 1956.
[3] His rewrite was likely predicated on knowing Tom Ewell would be the star, and so turned Augie Poole into a pastiche of Richard Sherman from The Seven Year Itch.
[5] There was special interest in this play for local audiences, since the setting was the nearby community of Westport, the home of co-author Peter De Vries.
[5] However, the reviewer disliked the double-takes and double-entendres Fields inserted into the play: "It's humors are a cotton substitute for the brilliant whimsey and urbanity which Mr. De Vries put into his original novel".
[5] The reviewer also noted that star Tom Ewell was playing the same character he had portrayed in The Seven Year Itch.
An out of town reviewer reported the audience laughed non-stop at the dialogue, which troubled Theresa Helburn of the Theatre Guild.
[16] The reviewer considered Tom Ewell's performance as central to the play's success, while also praising Darren McGavin and Nancy Olson.
[16] Calling it "completely joyous entertainment", she also suggested cutting some excess dialogue and speeding the pace up at a few points.
[19] Upon receipt of the good reviews from Philadelphia, the Theatre Guild allowed ticket sales for the Broadway run to begin January 30, 1957.
[21] The Broadway premiere was at the Royale Theatre on February 13, 1957, allowing advertising to emphasize the proximity of Valentine's Day.
Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times was severe: "The 'Tunnel of Love' is a one-gag job.... After the first act had slipped by agreeably, this department thought it was looking at a piece of hackwork".
John Chapman centered his praise around Tom Ewell's portrayal of "innocent misery", while urging a faster pace in the middle act.
[22] Martin Dickstein also felt Ewell's performance was "most of the fun", "even though all of the laughs revolve around the same little joke from beginning to end".
[23] Columnist Danton Walker was especially disparaging of "the Theatre Guild's little whatsit" which treated its subject "with the delicacy of a pile driver".
[29] Only Parks and Hunt from the Broadway run joined the tour, leading a reviewer to lament "a first road company performance in which the lines were read with too much care".
[29] The cast also included Gerald Metcalfe as Dick, Anna Minot as Alice, Margaret O'Neill as Estelle and Carolyn Brenner as Miss McCracken.
[31] This was a misjudgement on the part of MGM; by the time the film was released in November 1958, the country had been saturated with community and regional stage productions of the play.