The Fox on the Fairway

It was a chilly summer here on the North Coast but the early autumn is warm and sunny, so maybe it’s appropriate that the North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka has begun its 29th season with a summer stock comedy about golf, The Fox on the Fairway. 

 This 2010 play by Ken Ludwig is given the full farce treatment by director David Moore, especially with lots of doors entering onto scenic designer Calder Johnson’s set. (Though the game is golf, the action is inside.) People running in and out of doors, chasing and avoiding each other, entering unexpectedly and leaving inconveniently—it’s the signature of stage farce. It’s basically the same setup as in NCRT’s 2009 production of Ludwig’s more famous Lend Me a Tenor.

In this story, Bingham (played by Anders Carlson) runs a country club that holds an annual golf tournament with a rival club run by “Dickie” (Phil Zastrow.) The two make a huge bet on the outcome. But the player Bingham was counting on has changed sides, and all seems lost until Justin (Michael Pietrelli), the callow young man Bingham has just hired as his assistant, turns out to be a golf prodigy. But of course complications ensue, involving Bingham’s business manager, Pamela (Jennifer Trustem), his wife, Muriel (Gloria Montgomery) and a club waitress and Justin’s fiancé, Louise (Kyra Gardner.)

 These descriptions soon turn out to only scratch the surface of their tangled relationships. Their pasts are prologue to the quickly unfolding events. Director Moore keeps it all moving fast whenever possible. The dialogue scenes depend on the comedic characterizations of the actors. Jennifer Trustem’s Pamela is straight out of a 1940s movie, the sweetly hard-drinking and wittily sensual woman with an innuendo for every occasion. Michael Pietrelli is the energetic movie juvenile and Kyra Gardner the winsome ingénue: Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, but with modern neuroses.

 At the center of the action and the story is Anders Carlson. He had a key role in Lend Me a Tenor but this production completely revolves around his performance. He plays Bingham with a controlled, rolling frenzy, as a man of constant outrage reminiscent of “the boss” character in TV sitcoms from the 50s onward. It’s a physical and vocal tour de force, and the wonder isn’t just that he pulls it off, but that he does it without becoming insufferable.

 This seems to be accomplished partly by his genuine interactions with the other actors. Together they manage to make something human out of a cascade of contrivances. That includes the contributions of the always believable Gloria Montgomery in her few scenes, and Phil Zastrow, who seems to play Dickie as an affected pretend Englishman breezily unaware of his malapropisms or terrible taste in sweaters.

 The pleasures of the production and the wit of the script (with contrivances from Oscar Wilde as well as I Love Lucy) must race past basic credibility problems, like everything hinging on a bet for very high stakes witnessed by nobody. (And who exactly is the fox of the title?)

 Some of the revelations are at least foreshadowed (pretty obviously), but some developments seem like a child’s improbable improvisations while inventing a story with dolls or action figures (possibly waving golf clubs.) The appeal of Pietrelli and Gardner as the young lovers, and the older four as the love springs eternal ones, mostly overcome the clichés. As a farce, this play adds nothing new except perhaps greater latitude in naughty talk. For farce that actually expands the form, something from early Tom Stoppard or Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw more nearly fit the bill. But there are enough laughs here, plus charm and skill in this production, to extend a summery mood.

 Jenneveve Hood designed the strange and striking costumes. Michael Thomas designed the inventive sound, which is crucial to the story. The Fox on the Fairway continues at North Coast Rep Fridays and Saturdays through October 13 at 8 p.m., with a Thursday evening performance on October 11 and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. on September 30 and October 7.

Arsenic and Old Lace: Auntie Mayhem at Ferndale Rep

 “A play was like a watch that laughed.” So wrote theatre critic Walter Kerr, describing the mechanism of Broadway comedies of the 30s and 40s, like The Front Page, Room Service, You Can’t Take It With You and the 1939 play now on stage at Ferndale Repertory Theatre, Arsenic and Old Lace.

 Situations and relationships get wound up tighter and tighter in the first act, and fly apart in the mayhem of the second. There are typically lots of characters and several simultaneous disasters-in-progress. Arsenic and Old Lace is best known today for the movie version starring Cary Grant and directed by Frank Capra, but the play was a Broadway hit during World War II, running for three and a half years and 1444 performances.

 Several of the actors in the original cast are also in the movie: Josephine Hull and Jean Adair as the maiden aunt sisters, and John Alexander as nephew Teddy Brewster, who believes he is really Teddy Roosevelt. The movie is pretty faithful to the play, with a few added cinematic scenes and differences in detail.

 The play (the only success of Kansas playwright Joseph Kesselring) begins in a more leisurely fashion, with one of the elderly aunts serving tea in the front room of a solidly traditional Brooklyn house, to her neighbor, Reverend Harper. It’s clear that the aunts are beloved for their cheery charity, but the Reverend is troubled by the romance between his daughter, Elaine, and another nephew, Mortimer Brewster. 

He objects to Mortimer spending so much time in certain unseemly places. That’s his job: Mortimer is a theatre critic. But the sedate witticisms of this scene constitute the only quiet moments of the play. The young lovers, Mortimer and Elaine, sweep in and announce their engagement, but after Elaine goes, Mortimer learns that his aunts have expanded their charity work: they bring peace to lonely old men by poisoning their elderberry wine and burying them in the cellar--with an appropriately prayerful funeral service.

 Further complications ensue, principally generated by the sudden appearance of a third nephew, Jonathan Brewster, the black sheep who returns as an international criminal looking for a hideout, and a place for his faithful plastic surgeon companion, Dr. Herman Einstein, to give him yet another new face. The one he’s currently wearing reminds people of Boris Karloff (the famous Frankenstein), which enrages him. (Original Broadway production audiences got additional laughs because Jonathan was played by Boris Karloff.)

 In the Ferndale production, director Renee Grinnell has the story and the cast moving briskly across the handsome set, though there is so much going on that the play pushes the clock to two and a half hours, with intermission. Several of the performances are reminiscent of the movie: Wanda Stamp has the same sweet charm (if not the same funny walk) as Josephine Hull playing Aunt Abby, Steven Fontain is an even more political cartoonish Teddy than the movie’s John Alexander, and Evan Needham sneaks in some Peter Lorre notes as Dr. Einstein.

 Lexus Carlton Landry as Jonathan is even more menacing (with a deliciously chilling laugh) than Raymond Massey in the movie, and Marilyn McCormick as Aunt Martha has no comparison—with her authoritative voice and the rapturous and murderous gleam in her eye, she ups her auntie.

 Sam Cord has the most difficult role as Mortimer, and it is his energy, clarity and physicality that propel the play forward. He doesn’t quite have the expressions and moves of Cary Grant that made the movie so funny, but then, who does?

 Brittany Gonzales (Elaine), Samuel Dallas McComber (Rev. Harper and Lt. Rooney), Tom McCarthy (Mr. Witherspoon), Neal Schoonmaker (Officer O’Hara) and Denim Ohmit (Officer Brophy) contribute to this competent production.

 In fact, the clockwork machinery tends to obscure just how weird this play is: part romance, part thriller, it’s a macabre comedy with the mechanism of farce. Even Frank Capra couldn’t settle on a consistent style for it. The moral ambiguities at the heart of it are never quite dealt with, though the pieces are there. Too many gears may be going for one evening, but Ferndale fans will find some laughter in the old machinery yet.

 Arsenic and Old Lace is at Ferndale Rep for only two more weekends: June 5,6,12,13 at 8:00 pm, with Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. on June 7 and 14. Incidentally, though there are funny lines about theatre and critics in this show, for my money the funniest play with critics as characters is still Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound.

 Coming Up: The second-year students of Dell'Arte International's MFA program present Tell Me A Story, an evening of participatory storytelling, Thursday through Sunday, June 4-7 at 8 p.m. in the Carlo. Looking forward, Dell’Arte kicks off the annual Mad River Festival on June 20 by presenting a Lifetime Achievement Award to stage and screen actor Rene Auberjonois, in a ceremony followed by festivities (featuring the Joyce Hough Band and Joanne Rand) in the Rooney Amphitheatre beginning at 8:30 pm.

Noises Off at Ferndale Rep

Michael Frayn is an unusual playwright. He began as a reporter and columnist, and has written several novels and books of philosophy, such as the nearly 500-page tome, The Human Touch, which I’ve actually read (encouraged by the San Francisco Chronicle, which paid me to do so.) Probably his most famous play is Copenhagen, a drama concerning two founders of quantum physics. His most recent plays are biographical and political, and he’s a well-regarded translator of Anton Chekhov.

 Then there are his comedies, one of which was so subtle that lead actor Ian McKellan didn’t realize it was supposed to be funny until opening night, when he heard the audience laughing. Noises Off however is anything but subtle, although Frayn maintains it is philosophical: he writes that it concerns the actors’ fear of facing the unrehearsed world outside the theatre.

 But like another British philosophical playwright—Tom Stoppard—Frayn found that philosophy goes over best on stage when it is expressed by people dashing frantically about, with at least one young lady in her underwear.

Noises Off is generally acknowledged to be his comic masterpiece, and one of the funniest plays in contemporary theatre. I saw the original Broadway version in the 80s, from the back of the 1100 seat Brooks Atkinson Theatre (the last rush ticket I ever bought), which at that distance was like watching a circus of comical ants. So I made sure to sit close to the stage at Ferndale Rep.

 In the first act we see a theatre company in a rushed final rehearsal of a farce called Nothing On. The set—part of a country house replete with the many doors required by farce—is turned around for the second act so the backstage is visible, and the relationships and romantic misalliances set up in the first act result in riotous physical comedy. (It was probably this act that Frayn kept rewriting, to include new business invented by various casts.)

 The stage is turned around again for the third act, for a performance at the end of the tour when the actors’ relationships have devolved further, and the chaos has spilled onto the stage.

 The first act is usually the set-up for the next two, but in the Ferndale production it was genuinely funny. The cast performed the physical comedy of the second act flawlessly, producing the most hilarious moments. The third act had lots of payoffs and comic business but seemed less coherent, which is an odd word to use about chaos.

 Besides accomplishing the physical bits at break-neck speed, the actors also had to quickly sketch characters in the first act, aided by Frayn’s skill in providing most with attitudes and catch phrases to capture their characters. 

The entire cast--Adina Lawson, Bryeon Earle, Sam Cord, Brittany Gonzales, Bill and Gerri Cose, Jim Berry and Daniel Amaral—performed both jobs with skill and conviction. Sam Cord deserves special mention for the most acrobatic stunts. All in all, it’s a high quality production, with a solidly handsome set designed by Gary Franklin (during the two unavoidable but draining intermissions, audience members seemed to like watching it be turned around), and 1980s period costumes (complete with leisure suit) by Christen Condry Whisenhunt.

 Director Renee Grinnell, who did Lend Me A Tenor at NCRT last season, again demonstrates her facility for fast-paced farce. Some of the physical humor involves a telephone cord, a lost contact lens and a plate of sardines. It’s fascinating that in the age of cell phones, disposable lenses and microwaved snacks that this comedy still works.

Also the story involves a style of theatre and a theatrical tradition unfamiliar to most of us here, and largely gone. Even the titles (“Noises Off,” “Nothing On”) are British and theatrical puns. But even without the depth of reference, the basic structure and theatricality of  Noises Off can delight audiences in Humboldt County.  Plus the style of Frayn’s language is familiar—he shares a comedic (and philosophical) lineage with Monty Python, Douglas Adams and Beyond the Fringe.

 Besides, theatre stories have their own charm and wide attraction. People who have participated in theatre may have encountered actors like the earnest Frederick, the pompous but vague Garry, etc., or they recognize the stage culture of endearments and entanglements, and this knockabout will have additional resonance, and even sweetness.

The Tenor is a Farce

You wind it up tight in the first act, and in the second act it flies apart, only to somehow come together in the end. That’s the basic mechanism of farce, and it’s a lot harder to accomplish than it sounds.

The script is of paramount importance, and if you wanted a textbook example of modern farce construction, you might well choose Lend Me A Tenor by Ken Ludwig, now being staged at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka. Even though it first hit Broadway in 1989, this play has the classic American feel of the 1930s-50s. I imagine Ludwig growing up in York, Pennsylvania watching screwball comedies and “I Love Lucy” reruns.

The premise is a comedy standard: high culture meets Main Street; stars meet the stardom-starved. The Cleveland Grand Opera Company lands the most famous Italian tenor, Tito Merelli, for its production of Verdi’s “Otello.” Merelli’s arrival is heralded by Saunders, the company’s ambitious general manager, and his starstruck daughter, Maggie, who pines for a romantic adventure before settling down with her father’s assistant (and aspiring singer), the stage-shy Max. Merelli arrives late, with a tempestuous wife and a bad stomachache.

Added to the basic mix are a crazed fan bellhop and a couple of other amorous women with Tito in their sights. The action takes place in Merelli’s hotel suite, replete with the requisite array of doors leading to other rooms and closets. The complications to come are carefully prepared by the kind of seemingly random details that in a mystery would point you to the murderer: Saunders and Merelli are taking the same sleep-inducing medication, and Merelli lets it be known that he doesn’t need the Company’s Otello costume, he has his own. In fact, he carries two of them, just in case… there's opportunity for a two-Otello mixup, complete with a body in the bed and a woman in the bathroom.

These parts are well cast. As Saunders, Jerry Nusbaum brings an acid voice and nervous energy that oscillates between panic and despair. As Maggie, Kim Hodel radiates youth and innocence, but can turn naughty with the same midwestern enthusiasm.

Michele Shoshani has just a few scenes as Julia, another older opera official, but she quickly establishes her character as a game if not especially hopeful seductress. Shelley Stewart also makes the most of her scenes as Diana, a sultry, sexual huntress of the careerist kind, who wants to parlay her Cleveland Desdemona opposite Merelli into international stardom. Sam Cord does a showy comic turn as the bellhop, and Lora Canzoneri brings energy and commitment to the role of Maria, Tito’s wife (so although the character as written is the least satisfying, being little more than some weary stereotypes about Italian women, her performance makes it credible enough for the story.)

But the evening depends on Evan Needham as Max and Anders Carlson as Merelli. Not only are these the key roles in the farce, but a lot depends on their relationship. That’s actually what makes this play more like some screen screwball comedies, by Preston Sturges or Frank Capra, say: there’s a core of human warmth inside the comic complications. In this case, it’s not only the romance between Max and Maggie, but the connection between two singers: a star and a beginner. That also turns out to be a key to the farce itself.

Needham and Carlson work together well (and they have the voices to carry off the brief but euphoric singing.) Needham moves from anxiety to swagger as his character’s fortunes change, without losing his essential sincerity. Carlson has an even greater task in humanizing this clichéd figure of the Italian tenor, and by softening and deepening his performance gestures he creates a convincing and appealing character. NCRT often finds the sweetness and simple humanity in their productions, and that’s true this time, too.

The identity mix-up has layers to it, as Max must become a real star singer to successfully pretend to be one, which affects his romance with Maggie. Though the mix-up works partly because only a few of our Clevelanders have seen the real tenor, there's a certain suspension of disbelief involved, especially in Maggie confusing them, but there's actually less than in several Shakespeare plays, and anyway, it didn't bother me. And I liked the decision to go with partial smudgy blackface for Othello. It keeps our attention on the characters, and not on the inevitable minstrel show associations.

Renee Grinell’s direction is astute: she speeds things along when appropriate (including a 90 second pantomime of the whole play just before the curtain call), but produces slower moments for character and emotion, and even some subtler comedy. Scenic designer Bill Cose and scenic artist Mark Fontaine seem to know their 1930s era midwestern swank hotel décor, and the set is ingeniously workable for the inevitable hiding-in-the closet machinations. Marcia Hutson created the evocative costumes, and Calder Johnson designed the lighting.

The script is inevitably predictable at points, but there are some surprises and verbal wit as well as physical comedy. This is a fine production and a fun evening. Some tentative moments on opening night should disappear, as the cast gets comfortable with the pace and the complicated stage business. That’s important because as dependent on a sound mechanism as farce is, it becomes really funny when the actors lessen reliance on stock gestures and poses, and convey in the moment that their characters completely believe the situation, and are improvising their way out of it.

Are you having pun yet?  Ludwig is an American playwright, but the pun of the title "lend me a tener" is more comfortably British, where fivers and teners are more common monetary slang.

“Lend Me A Tenor” plays through August 9.

The Madwoman of North Coast Rep

Greedy financiers and rapacious corporate exploiters ready to do anything to get more oil to wage more war might well inspire the shock and awe of recognition, especially through the words of Jean Giradoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot, currently at the North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka. Written in the midst of World War II, the text is witty and incisive on currently painful topics, expressed in a program note by director Renee Grinell: “Forty years ago, when I first read The Madwoman of Chaillot, another war was raging, and so was I. I lost friends in the Vietnam War, and now, forty years later, I am losing the sons and daughters of friends.”

But while such parallels can cause shivers, this play’s insights are wrapped in a comic fable with reputedly batty old ladies as the saviors of civilization, symbolized by a Paris café where the poor and the jugglers are as welcome as the aristocrats and corporate con men.

As the main Madwoman—Aurelia, Countess of Chaillot and owner of the café—Michele Shoshani exudes Gallic charm and the warmth of the character, holding the play together with her stage presence and skill. Bob Service is effective as the philosophical ragpicker who in the second act mock trial demonstrates that the unitary executive has been tried before, under different names. Kicking her first act nun’s habit and broker’s suit, Gloria Montgomery holds center stage and our attention as the judge in that same scene. Pam Service has good comic timing as the Sewer Man. There’s a sweet but slight young lovers subplot that Delcie Moon and Sam Cord handle nicely.

Darcy Daughtry works small miracles with the costumes, and except for a dubious brick wall, Calder Johnson’s set serves the play well. I wasn’t so taken with some of the exaggeration and awkwardness that undercut the satire in an admittedly wordy play, and there were stretches that on opening night just weren’t funny. The cast’s increasing familiarity with the words and with each other could change that.

Perhaps the most famous line from this play is Aurelia’s observation that ''Nothing is ever so wrong in this world that a sensible woman can't set it right in the course of an afternoon.'' It’s disingenuous in a practical sense, but apart from the danger of confirming the complacency of the well-meaning, it does support the proposition that once the relatively simple truths about war for profit are faced, it’s just as natural to live decently as it supposedly is to live rapaciously. There is that hope.

The Mad Cuckoo Clock: On the Razzle at OSF

 Playwright Tom Stoppard, who turned 70 on July 3, is having quite a year. After a triumphant run at Lincoln Center, his epic 9-hour trilogy, Coast of Utopia, won more Tony Awards than any drama in history. And his newest play, Rock ‘n Roll, is Broadway bound.

 He’s had other great years (it was his fourth Tony for Best Play) but in a recent interview Stoppard reiterated that as a playwright “you don’t succeed unless you’re writing something that will be revived.” In a 1994 interview Stoppard named his 1981 farce, On the Razzle as the play he most wanted done again. That the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of On the Razzle is one of their current season’s triumphs must add to this year’s satisfactions.

 Beginning with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in the late 60s, Stoppard’s string of witty and intelligently madcap plays for stage, television and radio made him an international phenomenon. By 1981, this former theatre reviewer for provincial publications was living in a fashionable London district, in a house older than the United States.

 But his plays were about to change: first with a new infusion of emotion and more recognizable characters (particularly women) in The Real Thing (1982), and then combining this with historical depth and delicately rendered explorations of meaning in the subsequent plays (Arcadia, Indian Ink, The Invention of Love, etc.) leading to his most recent.

 But before he let go of the frenzied verbal gymnastics and headlong comedy, Stoppard powered those energies into the basic plot and characters from the 19th century Austrian playwright Johann Nestoy, and went On the Razzle—that is, on a heedless spree, a wide-eyed adventure—at full throttle: Stoppard running Wilde.

Which is not to say that this play is just a bag of puns and pratfalls. The puns and double entendres are certainly there (“Unhand my foot, sir!” “I love your niece!” “My knees, sir?” etc.) but there is no more exacting form than farce. It is a deceptively simple mechanism—you wind it all up in the first act, and let it spin wildly to its conclusion in the second—but it’s not easy to do.

 In all his plays Stoppard explores revelations from structure, so he was well equipped to create a classic farce. The OSF production, as directed by Laird Williamson, understands this mechanism. Late in the play, a character complains of people running in and out of her house like a “cuckoo-clock gone mad.” This is the image the play begins with, as the actors take the stage with the jerky motions of cuckoo-clock figures in procession.

The image also fits the place and period: 19th century Austria, where a pompous provincial shopkeeper (played with a touch of W.C. Fields by Tony DeBruno) leaves his grocery store in the hands of two clerks while he goes to Vienna to propose marriage, but the clerks (Rex Young and Tasso Feldman) go to Vienna as well for a last youthful adventure.

 There are other complications involving a niece (Teri Watts) and her suitor (Shad Willigham), a comic servant (G. Valmont Thomas), the fiancée (Suzanne Irving) and her widow friend (Terri McMahon) and other characters. There are disguises, mistaken identities, role reversals, mis-communication and of course lots of coincidence in this good-hearted, fast-paced farce that relocates some of Nestoy’s satire (as in a brilliant speech about merchants) but basically provides one funny surprise after another.

 This is a sumptuous production, a delight to the eye and ear. I suppose my only slight disappointment was in not hearing an English cast perform it. Though Stoppard translates easily to American idiom, the rhythms of language are very English, as the very English title suggests.

 Here’s a tidbit of its history that illustrates that happy accidents are not just part of the story, but were part of creating the play: its first production was in technical rehearsal (which is very near the end) when a “flaming pudding” Stoppard wanted in a restaurant scene was nixed because of fire regulations. Since Stoppard involves himself in the process, he was there to suggest the alternative: a birthday cake with electrically lit candles. But then he had to decide whose birthday it was. This involved rewriting many scenes back, and added another layer of the comic cake in the restaurant pay-off.

 Last time I wrote about the roots of theatre in ancient festivals. As formal theatre became part of festivals with summer productions outdoors, some began to specialize: mostly in Shakespeare.

 Another summer theatre tradition began in the early 20th century, when people fled hot cities like New York for the cooler countryside, and indoor summer theatres like the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut were born (there’s a fascinating book about it from Yale Press called An American Theatre.)

 Many country theatres featured lighter entertainments, but others experimented with new plays and challenging productions, as Westport did and does, joined by newer theatres like the Wellfleet on Cape Cod.

 The two traditions merged in indoor Shakespeare festivals, like the one I used to attend in the Elsinore-like stone Stephen Foster Memorial theatre at the University of Pittsburgh, or in the most successful all-season venues like Stratford, Ontario and of course, Ashland, Oregon.

 There the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is now in full swing, with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew on the outdoor Elizabethan Stage, As You Like It and August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean as well as Stoppard’s On the Razzle in the main Bowmer Theatre, to be joined by their Tartuffe later this month. Lisa Loomer’s Distracted has just opened at the New Theatre, where the musical Tracy’s Tiger continues.

 Here on the North Coast, there are two productions this weekend. Based partly on a story by Italian playwright Dario Fo and partially created as a thesis project last year at the Dell’Arte School, The Greatest Story Never Told is described as a farce involving the meeting of two tramps and the Christian Holy Family, as brokered by angels.

It’s up next at the Mad River Festival, July 12-14 in the Carlo Theatre. It’s the work of the Virginia-based Independently Creative troupe, composed of Dell’Arte alums. The production is supported by an alumni fund to commemorate a Dell ‘Arte classmate, Nancy Lafrenz, who died of cancer. “Her class raised a bunch of money,” Michael Fields explained, “and so did her parents. We’ve invited them to the opening, and the production is in her memory.”

 Also this weekend, Ferndale Rep opens Taking My Turn, a musical revue about and by seniors. It plays at the Rep on July 13 at 8 PM, and July 14 and 15 at 2 PM. Then it goes on the road later in the month to the Senior Resource Center in Eureka, and the Garberville Theatre.

The Ladies Who Act: The Ladies of the Camellias

In beginning their season with The Ladies of the Camellias, North Coast Rep demonstrates respect for North Coast audiences, repaid with an entertaining evening in which the audience will also learn some theatre and social history.

This play by the contemporary Los Angeles director Lillian Groag is billed as a farce, among the most satisfying theatrical forms when it works. However, it is also one of the most difficult to write and direct. The pleasures for participants as well as audience of creating waves of riotous laughter, each new one “topping” the last, has been too tempting for many playwrights to resist. (If not for his untimely illness and death, August Wilson’s next play sounded like it was going to be a farce.)

 Some contemporary playwrights have successfully created classic farce (Joe Orton comes to mind) but many have failed. Others have upped the ante by using farcical elements in more politically and socially ambitious plays—Tom Stoppard, for instance. Then there are the influences on writers as well as audiences of the movie hybrids—the Marx Brothers films, slapstick and screwball comedies.

 We have one contemporary play about the theatre that is as close to classic farce as modern ironic drama gets—Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (the movie version, with such luminaries as Carol Burnett, Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve, also demonstrates the difficulty of translating stage farce to screen.)

 The play at NCRT is stylistically more complex, and its content is more ambitious. The Ladies of the Camellias is set in late 19th century Paris, when new approaches from Germany, Russia and England were about to create the modern theatre that is the operational basis for the dramatic arts of our time.

 Two formidable actresses towards the end of the age of star-driven drama, Italian diva Eleanora Duse and the French legend, Sarah Bernhardt, were each to appear in the same romance, The Lady of the Camellias by Alexander Dumas (which is also the basis of the famous Greta Garbo film, Camille.)

 Meanwhile, a production of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac is opening down the street. This was also an era of social and political turmoil that would eventually lead to World War I and the Communist revolution in Russia. All of these elements bear on the action onstage.

 This history is the substance of this play, surrounded by a variety of verbal as well as physical comedy, from droll Wildean witticisms (“A cynic is a romantic sulking”) to acerbic Noel Cowardly observations (about audiences entertained by a socially-conscious play, who then “go off and vote for the wrong people.”)

 Much of the humor is about theatre, and much of that is based on affectionate cliches about the excesses and vanities of actors, though there are some theatrical in-jokes of the kind that added bonus zest to Shakespeare in Love. Is theatre a playground for the rich, or are actors as socially outcast as anarchists? The roles of art and politics, of thought and feeling, form one of this play’s themes with contemporary resonance.

 Both Michele Shoshani (a veteran Bay Area performer new to the North Coast) as Sarah Bernhardt, and Gloria Montgomery (fresh from her triumph in NCRT’s Broadway Bound) as Duse effectively play these actresses as practical and intelligent, in charge of their legends and aware of the utility of their frivolities. Thanks in part to excellent costuming, Shoshani even looks French, and Montgomery has that Italian glow.

 The male partners (onstage and sometimes off) of these grand actresses were necessary but definitely inferior appurtenances, and Hans Crynock and David Hamilton milk those roles for all their obvious and subtle comedy, and even more subtle pathos. Crynock excels at small hilarious gestures and body language, while Hamilton brings an air of eager earnestness with a touch of sadness that gives his physical comedy another dimension.

As a play, The Ladies of the Camellias has problems. A good farce is like a wind-up toy: the first act winds it up, and it runs amuck in the second. But this play is so long and tries to do so much (perhaps too much) that it forces a single hysterical speed from the beginning.

Fortunately, Lonnie Blankenchip as Alexander Dumas arrives in time to admirably slow it down and anchor it for the audience. After a frenetic and excessive start (at least I find the miming of the lines more annoying than funny), both the gifted Theresa Ireland and the skillful Bob Wells have their moments. Nobody could make the two syllables of “password” funnier than Wells does.

 Without Nathan Pierce’s solid performance as the anarchist “Ivan,” this play with a large cast of differentiated characters and more than the usual amount of information to absorb, would have been unintelligible. Edward Olson provides a bracing turn—I won’t give away his surprise, but it enacts (and mocks) the classic farce mechanism of the Deus ex machina, the sudden solution dropping from the sky.

 A handsome set (framed by evocative, Beardsley-style posters) and the other elements of presentation support an audience-pleasing production. There were opening weekend problems of lines and timing that the actors should overcome as the run goes on.

 Director Carol Escobar had to deal with a play that sprawls in time and stage space, but is too interconnected to cut (and the playwright might react as the Blankenchip’s Dumas does to the idea of cutting text: as if it were a knife wound.) But a tighter play would have encouraged more differentiated and effective pacing and focus. Still, the opening Saturday night audience followed the action and had a good time, and subsequent audiences should, too.