Boeing-Boeing at TheatreWorks
2013-12-11
Farce is at least as old as Julius Caesar's Ghost and a helluva lot funnier. It dates romantic, screwball and situation comedy by centuries and, yet, it is, relatively speaking, the blue moon of comedy. Especially the good ones. Not since Feydeau was a pup has farce been the meat and drink of comedy. Oh, sure, a real spiffy one hits the boards every once in a while, such as Michael Frayn's Noises Off (1983), one of the all-time champs, and Ken Ludwig's Lend Me a Tenor (1989), which is great fun, but really more Marx Brothers homage than fresh inspiration. And while many excellent dramatists - most notably, Alan Ayckbourn - rely on farcical elements such as mistaken identity and failed communication, very few playwrights truly ply this ancient craft (Ray Run for Your Wife Cooney, a genuine farceur, enjoys success in amateur theater but can't get arrested on Broadway).
And, as rare as it on stage, farce is scarcer still in film and television, Fawlty Towers being a wonderfully welcome exception, and that was 35-38 years ago. Episodes such as Communication Problems and The Kipper and the Corpse remain the gold standard of old-fashioned, in-one-door-and-out-the-other farce.
TheatreWorks New Milford presently takes a spirited flier at Marc Camoletti's Boeing Boeing, a genuine hit in France and England in the early 1960s before laying an egg on Broadway in 1965. Interestingly enough, the play returned to the Main Stem for a healthy run (279 performances) and won the 2008 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play. Still, one presumes that the stellar cast, led by Mark Rylance, who won his first Tony Award for his performance as the nebbishy Robert, won over audiences and critics rather than Camoletti's script.
It's not that the play isn't good: it's just not very good. It concerns a randy deceiver, Bernard (James Hipp), a Yank living on Paris, who juggles three stewardesses - American Gloria (Erin Shaughnessy); Italian Gabriella (Reesa Roccapriore); and German Gretchen (Vicki Sosbe) on a tight and precarious schedule. Berthe (Jody Bayer), Bernard's sardonically dry maid and virtual air traffic controller, keeps the decks clear for landings and take offs, the cuisine correct and the wall pictures straight. Trouble is, those fast, new 707 jets squeeze more flights in and out and, as one can guess, more than one girlfriend (fiancée, actually) in Bernard's swinging flat at a time. Inevitably, someone's slip will cause a slip and Bernard will have to think fast.
As luck would have it, Bernard's old college chum, Robert (Matt Austin) pops in to visit and finds himself, initially, a reluctant accomplice. Much to his pleasant surprise, his involvement becomes more hands-on and his once deflated self-esteem catches full sail.
Director-cum-set and costume designer Joseph Russo tries to keep the energy up and things moving, but one can't deny the script too often stands still, with characters talking far more than one expects in a door-slamming sex farce. What it really boils down to is that the audience has no genuine interest in seeing Bernard stay out of trouble or get his comeuppance. Fact is, one doesn't really care what happens to him. It's not like he's desperately trying to achieve success for the greater good, but rather, he just wants pure hedonism, and most theatergoers probably resent him for it. He's not, after all, like the actors in Noises Off or, for that matter, the main characters in Lend Me a Tenor, who try against all odds and Murphy's Law to Get Through the Performance of their respective shows. Comparatively speaking, whatever is at stake in Bernard's "problem" doesn't engage the audience enough. Turns out that the girlfriends don't really warrant our sympathy either, as their desires are rather selfish, too.
So, why then do we spend over two hours with these characters? Well, Russo's production design is visually appealing with its mod period garb and styles. Furthermore, the actors invest fully in the imaginary circumstances of their characters. One could therefore say that the production team rises above the script's predictability and technical shortcoming to make the evening worth the audience's while. The gang on stage has a ball and that joy is contagious.
The high-energy cast seems to split into two styles of acting. Hipp, Shaughnessy, Roccapriore and Sosbe aim for the naturalistic, no-seam style while Austin and Bayer affect, or play at their characters in the style of the better-known sketch performers (think The Carol Burnett Show). Sosbe comes across the most successfully as she fairly lights up the stage, from her high-voltage entrance to her effective tag lines. Though playing a perceivable style, one follows her without awareness that she's consciously acting. Sure, Sosbe's acting, but one doesn't actually catch her at it.
As usual, TheatreWorks' production elements lend a professional flavor to the performance, from the song choices in Tom Libonate's sound design to Richard Pettibone and Scott Wyshynski's lighting design, which underscores the comedy's bright comic tone.
Boeing Boeing may in fact be middling material, but, given TheatreWorks' genuine commitment to the play and the production's giddy performance, average farce, done well, trumps most other over-played genres of comedy.