Comedy of error

A botched suicide brings out the best of Foothills' Rumors

by Steve Vineberg

Directed by Michael Evan Haney. Set designed by Kyle D. Higgins. Costumes by Ted Giammona. Lighting by Sarah Sullivan. With Bruce Ward, Cheryl McMahon, Dimitri Christy, Bobbie Steinbach, Ellen Colton, John Davin, Michael Poisson, Sasha Carrera, Jack Celli, and Eve M. Wells. At Worcester Foothills Theatre, through October 24.

Rumors presents Neil Simon at his best -- that is, at his most unencumbered. He doesn't want to melt our hearts or win another Pulitzer; all he wants to do is give his audience a good time. The play, a farce set among moneyed professionals in the suburbs of Manhattan, isn't perfect: it's a little lopsided, with a somewhat misshapen second act. But it brings out all his best qualities -- his gift for one-liners, his uncanny instinct for how to build a gag, his love of irresistibly silly physical flourishes -- without making us pay for them, as I usually feel I end up having to do at a Simon play. Rumors is one of the two comedies I can think of by this playwright (the other is Laughter on the 23rd Floor) that build up so much good will in the first half that you're more than willing to forgive the structural problems in the second.

Michael Evan Haney's production, which opens the season at Foothills, isn't perfect either, but it too is put together with good will and driven by an entertainer's impulse. The main problem is that Haney doesn't pace it fast enough; the actors are permitted to make a meal out of too many moments that should simply be thrown away, and the climactic scene -- an elaborate story invented for an investigating cop -- is played with so many pauses that the scene self-destructs. (This monologue is an aria of sorts, but it only makes dramatic sense if it's delivered at breakneck speed.) And though most of the staging is modestly efficient, Haney botches the big moments, like the sweep of fatuous activity that brings down the first-act curtain. And though it's pleasant to see so many Foothills regulars on stage together, I would have cast a younger ensemble to complement the references in the script to 10-year anniversaries and elementary-school children.

The plot premise is so flimsy that it feels like essence of farce. Four couples are invited to celebrate the anniversary of the deputy mayor of New York and his wife, but when the first guests arrive they find the host upstairs, recovering from an unsuccessful suicide attempt (a gunshot to the head that merely punctured his earlobe), and his wife and the domestics mysteriously vanished. Since the friend who steps into this scenario is the deputy-mayor's lawyer (played by Dimitri Christy), his immediate reaction is to protect his client by concealing the truth -- as much as he's been able to ascertain -- from everyone else. With each successive arrival, the invented stories around the host and hostess's absence become more elaborate and more contradictory. Meanwhile physical disaster continues to strike in the form of back spasms, broken noses, smashed-up automobiles, scalded fingers, temporary deafness. The allegedly celebratory couple remains offstage throughout the play while their friends twist themselves into pretzels trying to account, to each other and finally to a pair of cops, for their failure to appear and take charge of the party.

The cast marches through this spirited nonsense with great energy. Bruce Ward, as a sardonic accountant, has also mastered the right frazzled high-comic style. Ward has the slightly fishy look Eric Blore used to bring to his roles as butlers and hotel clerks and dance instructors in the Astaire-Rogers musicals, and he has Blore's short fuse, too, but what he adds to them is a parody of drawing-room sophistication. In the role of a TV chef with back pain who seems to occupy her own stratosphere, Ellen Colton proves herself a winning clown. Michael Poisson doesn't establish a strong enough personality for the novice politician he's playing, but you have to admire the skill of his delivery. Both Cheryl McMahon (as Ward's wife) and Bobbie Steinbach (as Christy's wife) earn their laughs; McMahon is funniest when her takes are low-key rather than extravagant, and Steinbach takes a while to settle in -- as soon as her character gets wasted on vodka, her timing sharpens up. Christy's never does, unfortunately: game as he is, he treads too heavily -- he never catches onto the style. Some of the other actors have the same difficulty with this material: John Davin as Colton's husband, a relentlessly upbeat therapist; Sasha Carrera as a jealous wife; Jack Celli as the cop who grills the guests.

I think that audiences will enjoy this show, however. It doesn't feel skimpy -- either underrehearsed or underdesigned. You don't get the feeling that you're being forced at gunpoint to laugh at every joke or that the actors are merely enjoying their own cleverness. Not everyone in the cast comes off equally well, it's true, but the actors seem focused on the project -- they're all at the service of Simon's play, which they clearly understand is meant as a treat for the audience. It's honest employment.