A summer of bad weather and bad news makes folks cry out for diversion. It’s a fine time for comedies and farce in local theaters and fortunately the resident company at People’s Light in Malvern knows farce.
Moreover, they know it’s more than just actors pummeling each other and falling down. Farce is also bad jokes, mistaken identities, pure anxiety, red-faced embarrassment and sexual innuendo. Pain requires timing as precise as any punchline.
Getting the audiences laughing is no problem in the current production of Ken Ludwig’s undeniably funny farce “Moon Over Buffalo” at People’s Light. So frenetic is our daily pace today – let’s add to political angst and work anxiety unhealthy slices of reality TV served on smart phones and mixed with a gallon of social media – that Ludwig’s farce doesn’t seem so farfetched. What was breakneck staging on Broadway when Moon Over Buffalo opened in 1995 appears almost sedate today compared with what’s streaming online. This formulaic farce looks fondly at the theatrical arts and offers familiar routines of life on and offstage letting audiences laugh with recognition rather than disbelief.
Simplicity is one key to inspiring laughter. Chaos is another. Ludwig’s somewhat backhanded tribute to the famous 20th century husband and wife actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne offers another middle-aged and emotionally frayed acting couple named George and Charlotte Hay in an equally run-down Erlanger Theater in Buffalo in 1953. But the Hays’ acting is far more blunt than the Lunts. Their over-the-top style would make WWF wrestlers blush. Touring in repertory with Noel Coward’s “Private Lives” and Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” George and Charlotte’s marital and theatrical partnership has reached what Cyrano might have called “une crise du coeur.” That’s when the chaos ensues.
George is discovered to have impregnated Eileen, the youngest female member of the cast. His solution is bottled at about 70 proof. The Hays’ daughter Rosalind was already planning to leave the cast and run off with her TV weatherman boyfriend and the fed up Charlotte is ready to do the same with their family lawyer. Yet they are forced to seek the drunken George through much of the second act, because this show must go on.
The Lunts famously preferred stage acting over screen acting and rejected Hollywood’s overtures. Not so George and Charlotte. In the midst of this family breakup they learn that the famous film director Frank Capra is coming to Buffalo just to catch their next performance. Getting George sobered up and into costume leads to an appropriately dramatic finale.
Director Pete Pryor has for years alternated between acting and directing duties at People’s Light and here makes full use of his extensive experience directing their past decade of farcical holiday pantos as well as its production of the farce “Noises Off” several seasons ago.
Longtime People’s Light Company members David Ingram and Mary Elizabeth Scallen are clearly having fun playing the hammy George and Charlotte Hay with the broadest possible brushes. With eyes popping and chests heaving they dash on and offstage shouting their lines and making noises like faulty steam engines. Long time People’s Light members Peter DeLaurier as the oily lawyer Richard and Marcia Saunders as Ethel, Charlotte’s mother smoothly provide moving parts for the plot, which prominently features an innocent-looking coffee pot in the background.
It’s fun and surprising to see in supporting roles the usually intense and physical Christopher Patrick Mullen as Howard the nerdy TV meteorologist and Julianna Zinkel as the bewildered Rosalind. Tabitha Allen as the pregnant but not particularly shamed Eileen and Kevin Bergen as the reliable actor Paul who’s pining for Rosalind are equally energetic as they try to force the Hays act like grown-ups. It’s a lost cause.
Set designer Yoshinori Tanokura, who created such simple, minimalist designs for Delaware Theater Company’s “Exonerated” and the People’s Light production of “Pride and Prejudice” has brought the elaborately shabby and cumbersome backstage of the Erlanger back to life sixty years after it closed and a decade after it was smashed to rubble.