An Old Fashioned Boy

In a sun-dappled America still humming with post-war jazz yet already flirting with the first whispers of flapper rebellion, David Harrington—sartorially precise, morally Victorian—constructs a dollhouse bungalow as a nuptial cage for Betty Graves, a platinum-haired sylph who treats tradition like yesterday’s corset. Their courtship implodes inside that pastel prison: she mocks its picket-fence banality; he recoils from her cosmopolitan disdain. Love, once a gilded promise, fractures into shards of gendered ideology. Enter Sybil—equal parts Hedda Gabler and Keystone acrobat—storming out of her own marriage over a hat, dragging three sugar-crazed offspring into David’s suddenly seismic living room. Measles, taffy fevers, and a quarantine charade concocted with Betty’s bemused physician father trap the fractured lovers under one feverish roof while Herbert, Sybil’s estranged spouse, crashes the chaos. What begins as a domestic farce mutates into a pastel-and-poison meditation on whether affection can survive the collision between walnut-paneled nostalgia and chrome-plated modernity. By the time the front door slams shut, alliances have been scrambled, pieties bruised, and David’s old-fashioned heart rebooted into a fragile, egalitarian hope.