Love hurts

Ayckbourn's sex farce doesn't get to first

by Steve Vineberg

HOW THE OTHER HALF LOVES By Alan Ayckbourn. Directed by Doug Landrum. Set designed by As Lee. Costumes by Ted Giammona. Lighting by Joe Saint. With Dimitri Christy, Cheryl McMahon, Mark S. Cartier, Sheila Stasack, Dan Bolton, and Deanna Dunmyer. At Worcester Foothills Theatre, through March 28.

During the 1970s, Alan Ayckbourn turned out so many popular comedies for London's West End that he acquired a

reputation as England's Neil Simon. His plays have never enjoyed the same success in America, however. PBS aficionados are mostly familiar with Ayckbourn through the imported British TV production of his trilogy, The Norman Conquests, but How the Other Half Loves predates it. I remember seeing an Americanized version of it in 1971 with Phil Silvers and Sandy Dennis when it tried out in Boston en route to Broadway and thinking that the depressingly predictable Neil Simon looked pretty good by comparison. The current production at Foothills does nothing to allay that original impression.

How the Other Half Loves is a comedy about a design gimmick. The set consists of two criss-crossed living/dining-room areas, one belonging to a befuddled executive named Frank Foster (Dimitri Christy) and his elegantly bored wife Fiona (Cheryl McMahon), the other to one of his employees, Bob Phillips (Dan Bolton) and his scattered spouse, Terry (Deanna Dunmyer) -- and to the Phillips's impossible, destructive baby, who remains offstage throughout, doing untold damage to further, unseen rooms. The two couples are mirror images of each other: while Fiona sets her addled husband on his course for the work day, helping him to finish his abandoned sentences, Bob complains, with increasing exasperation, about Terry's inability to keep their apartment reasonably organized and come up with something besides peanut butter for dinner. (At one point he offers her a $20 to outfit them with supplies from a local deli; Foothills has updated the setting, adding a computer and cordless phones, but some of the lines still ring with the much cheaper world of the early '70s.) The comic link between the two households is that, the night before the first scene, Bob and Fiona slept together.

If the idea of placing two living spaces within the same playing area strikes you as hilarious, then you'll probably love Ayckbourn's corollary idea, which is to set Act 1, Scene 2 simultaneously on two consecutive evenings. On Thursday, the new junior executive in Foster's department, William Detweiler (Mark S. Cartier) and his painfully shy wife Mary (Sheila Stasack) come to his boss's house for dinner; on Friday, they accept an invitation to Bob and Terry's (during which meal all hell breaks loose). Both evenings result from the lies the illicit lovers tell their spouses to cover their absences -- by coincidence, both use the innocent Detweilers as excuses. And somehow Frank determines that the marriage in crisis is the Detweilers' and that it needs his help to mend itself.

The play is actually closer to old-fashioned sex farce than Neil Simon usually gets, and it's so thin on characterization that you might as well be watching hand puppets. So perhaps it's unfair to place the entire blame for the unremitting banality of the performances on either the director, Doug Landrum, or the cast. But even with a flat-champagne script like this one, you'd hope for a modicum of style in the acting. Style doesn't mean mugging, however, and that's practically all the actors engage in. The three women in particular overplay everything; they seem to be competing for a bad acting prize. In the Foothills production of Ken Ludwig's Lend Me a Tenor, Cheryl McMahon, cast as the jealous wife of the Italian opera star, was admirably economical; here she does so many things with her face that you think it's going to break in little pieces, and she lingers on every line. Sheila Stasack affects an unconvincing midwestern accent and so inflates Mary's social terror that you've had it with this woman before she's been on the stage for 10 minutes. As for Deanna Dunmyer, she's out of control -- I couldn't figure out what she was playing in any scene. As for the men, both Dimitri Christy and Dan Bolton seem either inept or undirected. Only Mark S. Cartier, as the fastidious, hapless William, shows anything resembling farce style. He manages to carry off Ayckbourn's most stale notions of comedy, like an extended bit where he's desperate to use the bathroom but can't find a polite way to remove himself from his oblivious -- and garrulous -- boss's presence.

Except for Cartier and the striking black and red outfit Ted Giammona has come up with for McMahon in act two, nothing here works very well. The set designed by As Lee lumps two ugly living rooms together, so there's nothing to look at while you're searching for a distraction for the nothing you're already listening to. By the time act two had meandered to a close, I felt like my brain was full of sawdust; the piercing chill in the air outside the theater was a tonic.