Play: Scandalabra

Overview
Scandalabra is an unfinished satirical play by Zelda Fitzgerald, written in 1933 as a three-act farce. It stages a crowded social world where manners and reputation are currency, and the comic machinery of misunderstandings and theatricality drives the action. The play gleams with biting humor while exposing fault lines beneath a glittering social surface.

Plot and Structure
Set largely around an engagement party thrown by a Southern aristocrat, the piece uses a single evening of festivities to set off a cascade of comic complications. Scenes build from polite conversation to outrageous revelations, with escalating deceptions, disguised motives, and the sort of farcical reversals that promise a theatrical unmasking in a final act. Because Zelda never completed the play, the surviving material captures the setup and early spirals of chaos more fully than any neat resolution.

Characters
The cast is vividly drawn as a gallery of eccentrics: a proud, theatrical hostess who embodies old-world Southern pretensions; a newly engaged couple whose private anxieties clash with public appearances; meddling relatives and social climbers eager to exploit scandal; and outsiders whose bluntness or absurdity punctures polite hypocrisy. Many figures are sketched with a keen comic ear for dialogue and gesture, each voice contributing to the mounting absurdity of the evening.

Themes and Tone
Scandalabra operates as social satire, lampooning the rituals of class, marriage, and reputation. It skewers the performative aspects of Southern gentility while also interrogating the fine line between show and self. The tone ranges from lively, often vaudevillian comedy to sharper, almost elegiac moments when characters' vulnerabilities surface. Humor carries a sting: laughter reveals rather than conceals moral and emotional disarray.

Autobiographical Elements
Many elements echo Zelda's own life, weaving personal detail into the comic fabric. The play reflects preoccupations with marriage, artistic ambition, and the scrutiny of public life that marked her relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Characters and incidents mirror Zelda's experience of social expectation and creative frustration, turning private anxieties into theatrical spectacle. Her struggles with mental health and the disruptions they caused are felt in the play's unfinished state and in the moments where comedy yields to darker undertones.

Legacy and Significance
Left incomplete and unpublished during Zelda's lifetime, Scandalabra gained attention only decades later, when fragments and manuscripts became available to scholars and readers. Even as an unfinished piece, it offers a vivid testament to her dramatic imagination, comic timing, and capacity for cultural critique. The play enriches understanding of Zelda as a creative force in her own right, not merely as a companion to a famous husband, and invites speculation about how its promised final act might have resolved the tangled loyalties and exposed vanities it so gleefully skewers.