Don't See it

Dated script, shameless mugging sink Foothills farce

by Steve Vineburg

SEE HOW THEY RUN

By Philip King. Directed by Jack Neary. Set designed by Ken Goldstein. Lighting by Laura Happel. Costumes by Kristen Hubacz. With Denise Cormier, Buzz Roddy, Birgit Huppuch, Andrew Dolan, Beth Gotha, Charles Weinstein, Mark S. Cartier, Joseph Frustaci, and Paul Buxton. At Worcester Foothills, through February 25.

Good farce has a loopy grace and inevitability; it makes you feel helplessly airborne, like a hit of nitrous oxide. Bad farce, on the other hand, can be purgatorial -- you feel cut off from the spectacle, stranded, with the pretzel logic of the plot stuck inside your brain like a needle in the groove of a scratchy old vinyl album. See How They Run, currently on view at Foothills, is English farce of the most excruciating kind. The best examples of British comedy -- like the quirky movies produced at Ealing Studios in the late forties and fifties, starring the likes of Peter Sellers and Sir Alec Guiness -- are so distinctive and inspired that you forget how many of the comic entertainments written for the West End are tin-eared and witless, punctured balloons that can make you long for the broadest and flattest show on Broadway. See How They Run is in the latter category.

Philip King's play used to be a college and community-theater warhorse, but it was retired, finally, in the sixties. He wrote it in 1949, setting it in the vicarage of a sleepy town called Merton-cum-Middlewick, and it's definitely a period piece. The American military is still hanging around England as post-war routine has begun to morph into Cold War activity. One character is a U.S. corporal, and another is an escaped Russian spy who gasses on about the revolution and calls everyone "tovarich." More than once in the course of the play he's disarmed by the Yankee soldier, who tricks him into a Communist salute -- he's so programmed by Red propaganda that certain words trigger a robotic response.

The Cold War idiocy of the plot is the only aspect of the play that distinguishes it at all from dozens of other farces. The plot is premised on the unwise decision of the vicar's wife, an émigré American actress, to take the visiting corporal, an old friend from her U.S.O. days, to a production of Noel Coward's Private Lives -- a play they toured together for several years -- in a neighboring town. Since the next town over is out of bounds for the corporal, she induces him to leave his uniform at the vicarage and go disguised in one of her absent husband's clerical suits. The rusty mechanics of the farce gear up when a snooty, disapproving parishioner arrives in time to find these two recreating the end of the second act of Coward's comedy in the vicarage hall, with the corporal outfitted to look like the vicar, and assumes she's interrupted a nasty domestic spat. She tries to break it up, gets on the receiving end of what was supposed to be a stage punch, and winds up unconscious. And that's only act one. By the end of act two there are three men in clerical garb racing around Ken Goldstein's sturdy set while a fourth -- the vicar himself -- has been reduced to his underwear. By that time you're likely to be thinking wistfully of the Frasier rerun you could have stayed home to watch.

The Foothills production is flatfooted and amateurish, though I'm not sure what better staging and a stronger cast could have done with this material. Jack Neary seems to have used diagrams to direct the traffic on the stage. When the thin-lipped spinster Miss Skillon (Beth Gotha) drops a glove, she swings her body heavily to avoid stepping on it; later, when she's passed out in the hall, Neary diverts the chase of black-suited men so that they can leap over her, but she's so far downstage that they have to snake through the room to reach her. The effects are so labored that you're exhausted almost as soon as the farce revs up.

Neary has encouraged the company to mug shamelessly, and that's pretty wearisome too. Denise Cormier, who plays the vicar's wife, plays every line as if it were a cue to ring down the curtain. But she can't come close to winning the competition for scenery chewing, what with Birgit Huppuch as the nudge-nudge-wink-wink love-starved maid and Charles Weinstein, as a bishop (the vicar's uncle-in-law), cavorting as if he were stuck in the provinces in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. I'd declare it a draw between these two tireless performers. In fact, the only actors in the cast who opt for underplaying are Andrew Dolan (as the vicar) in the first act -- before King's script demands that he traipse around the stage in his boxers -- and Mark S. Cartier as a visiting parson in the second. Cartier is so relaxed on stage amid all the wound-up hijinks that you breathe a sigh of relief whenever he makes an entrance. I wanted to send him a thank-you note after the show, but by the time the lights came up my eyes could no longer focus and I had to hurry home to nurse my headache.