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Shuffling Off This Mortal Coil

Kurt Vonnegut is now in heaven, playing shuffleboard. As Vonnegut imagined in his 1970 play Happy Birthday, Wanda June, heaven is a place where everybody plays shuffleboard, Mozart, Einstein, Hitler, Lewis Carroll, Walt Disney, Jack the Ripper. Even Jesus Christ plays shuffleboard, and he's just one of the guys, with much more of a sense of humor than most people realize; Jesus wears a blue-and-gold warm-up jacket that has elaborate stitching on the back, reading "Pontius Pilate Athletic Club."

We don't actually see these shuffleboard players in the play—or learn how they all managed to get past the pearly gates—but they are referred to familiarly by two other residents of heaven, Wanda June and Major Siegfried von Konigswald. Wanda June was killed by an ice-cream truck on her 10th birthday, unfortunately before she got to have her party. Von Konigswald, a Nazi officer known as the Beast of Yugoslavia, was strangled during World War II after a career of torture and mayhem. They are friendly and relaxed in their Vonnegutian heaven, where, says Wanda June:

We have merry-go-rounds that don't cost anything to ride on. We have Ferris wheels. We have Little League and girls' basketball. There's a drum and bugle corps anybody can join. For people who like golf, there is a par-three golf course and a driving range, with never any waiting. If you just want to sit and loaf, why that's all right too.

Kurt Vonnegut's fertile brain was like that, distilling disaster and tragedy into a whimsical, bittersweet comedy of acceptance. He transmuted his own wartime experience as a POW in firebombed Dresden into his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse Five, and in each of his other books he could be counted on to provide yet another skewed, ribald, fantastical perspective on a world that was always finding a new way to go to hell. Or perhaps to heaven.

In Happy Birthday, Wanda June, the road to hell is paved with testosterone, sexism, and killing—and it's traveled by Harold Ryan, the protagonist, who is still very much earth-bound. Harold is the American soldier who strangled the Beast of Yugoslavia, and since that time he has killed, he says, "perhaps 200 men in wars of various sorts—as a professional soldier—[and] thousands of other animals as well—for sport."

As the play opens, Harold has just returned from 8 years of fighting wars and shooting game in the jungle, 8 years during which he has communicated with no one. He arrives unannounced in New York and lets himself into his old apartment, expecting his wife (named Penelope, of course) to resume her proper post-odyssey role, which he assumes is to make him comfortable and happy. Penelope has other ideas, as well as other suitors, and she announces early on, "This is a simple-minded play about men who enjoy killing—and those who don't."

Kurt Vonnegut did not enjoy killing, but he knew that the world contains many men who do, and he depicted them in all of their dangerous, ludicrous banality. A true comedian, he never forgot how ridiculous they can be. A true pessimist, he never forgot what havoc they can wreak. As Harold says toward the end of Wanda June, "Whoever has the gun, you see, gets to tell everybody else exactly what to do. It's the American way."

No guns in Vonnegut's heaven, though, just shuffleboard sticks. We will miss him down here—lots of killing still, not enough distillation.

The photo is me as Harold Ryan, in a 1973 UC Davis production of Wanda June directed by Everard d'Harnoncourt.

Personal Narratives, with Hubris

Craig Lucas's new play, Small Tragedy, is strong drama. It's playing at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley through May 14, directed fluidly by Kent Nicholson, and performed with lively precision by a cast of six. I recommend it.

Small Tragedy is the backstage story of an amateurish Boston troupe staging Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, something like a tragicomic version of Noises Off, but with far fewer laughs. The central drama is a tragedy, after all. But as the rehearsals bump along erratically and relationships between actors ebb and flow, the cast gradually transforms itself into a single performing organism. Lines between stage and life are blurred, and the erstwhile amateurs touch emotions and capabilities deeper than they thought possible.

It's a rare play that has six memorable characters, and an even rarer production with six actors who can bring them all to life.  All the characters are struggling with their own personal narratives, and the actors differentiate them vividly. Matteo Troncone has the juiciest role, Hajika, a Bosnian immigrant who plays Oedipus in the play-within-a-play. He smolders mysteriously, telling a somewhat different narrative to each person who asks, but with the common thread that he is a surviving Muslim who has lost his family and friends in the Serbian genocide. He catches fire playing the king, as though his personal tragedy gives him special insight into hubristic blindness. Troncone is completely believable, devious and open, complex and simple.

Hajika falls in love with and enthralls Jen (Carrie Paff), a vulnerable woman returning to theatre after the husband she supported through medical school divorces her. She plays Jocasta, first with narcissistic uncertainty, later with the intensity she draws from her own small tragedy (or, as she wonders, is it merely sadness?). Paff is powerful too, playing both the tentativeness and the later strength with three-dimensional realism. (Paff and Troncone are in the photo above.)

Mark Anderson Phillips plays Nathaniel, director of Oedipus Rex, who is also returning to theatre after a time of self-doubt. Nathaniel vacillates between being the kind of director who is an all-knowing dictator and one who believes in organic process, letting each actor develop his or her character. Playwright Lucas is particularly sharp here in his observation of theatrical quirks, and Phillips realizes the possibilities, depicting the director as alternately despotic and confused. Nathaniel's wife and sometime codirector Paola (Amy Resnick) also alternates modes, between complete support of her husband and frustration with his obvious failings. The relationship Lucas creates is rich and real, and Resnick, in a multilayered portrayal, snaps convincingly from concern to anger and back again.

Rebecca Schweitzer is Fanny, a neophyte actor and Jen's roommate, who is cast in the choral role of an elder (along with Paola). Fanny's role initially seems shallow and underwritten, but Schweitzer's comic timing and gradually deepening characterization give her weight and substance. Greg Ayers is the young gay actor Chris Masterson; Nathaniel misunderstands his name as Christmas, and the name sticks. Cast as Tiresias, Christmas is at first embarrassingly inept, but he too deals successfully with his own small tragedy of rejection and maturation. Ayers plays the difficult role with aplomb and understanding, and Christmas emerges with dignity.

The simplicity of the Aurora's thrust stage, with seating on three sides, puts the audience right on top of the actors. There's no place to hide, and these actors are up to the challenge. It's also an arrangement that encourages simple, almost stark, sets and lighting. Melpomene Katakalos provides a small amount of movable, redefinable furniture, a minimalist's approach, and Christopher Studley's lights are uncomplicated, occasionally picking out one character for a soliloquy. The costumes by Cassandra Carpenter are subtly artful, distinguishing rehearsal and stage personas in an understated way.

The play is not perfect. Lucas experiments with Robert Altman–style overlapping dialog, and while the technique sometimes works on stage, bouncing attention from one conversation to another, it goes on too long, finally generating confusion rather than illuminating complexity. Also, in the final scene, set more than a year after Oedipus closes, Lucas crams in what seems almost an entire new play to delineate the characters' further development and the unmasking of their delusions. The ending is therefore unnecessarily melodramatic, with simplistic parallels to Oedipus and imposed moralization. 

But these are small caveats. Small Tragedy is a very good play, and this is an exciting production. Any new play has kinks to work out, and often a playwright and director can't tell what adjustments are needed until they try a full staging. Most plays, even the promising ones, don't get a chance to be seen on stage at all, and many of those that are seen receive only thin-budget, amateur stagings that leave the audience wondering why the company bothers to perform anything but the standard classics. It's good that we have the Aurora Theatre, where new plays can get professional productions. Thanks to artistic director Tom Ross and the staff at the Aurora, Kent Nicholson and his six talented actors have had a chance to bring Craig Lucas's script to vivid life. It's a small triumph.

Updates and Developments

A few brief updates on recent posts: more information about George Bush's imperial reach, Arnold Schwarzenegger's capital dilemma, US climate delegates' lack of conscience, and fabulous people who happen to be dancers.

Yoo Better Watch Out

John Yoo's assertions of unfettered presidential power affected much more than the National Security Agency's secret snooping on US citizens.  Scott Shane writes in the New York Times that Yoo

first laid out the basis for the war on terror in a Sept. 25, 2001, memorandum that said no statute passed by Congress "can place any limits on the president's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing and nature of the response."

That became the underlying justification for numerous actions apart from the eavesdropping program, disclosed by The New York Times on Thursday night. Those include the order to try accused terrorists before military tribunals; the detention of so-called enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret overseas jails operated by the Central Intelligence Agency; the holding of two Americans, Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi, as enemy combatants; and the use of severe interrogation techniques, including some banned by international agreements, on Al Qaeda figures.

And Bush gladly—even angrily—accepted responsibility for the NSA snooping in a live radio address, saying he had reauthorized the program more than 30 times, despite the fact that relevant laws forbid it. There was no hint of apology for breaking the law, as he repeated his usual excuses about how terrorism changes everything. Senator Patrick Leahy said, "Our government must follow the laws and respect the Constitution while it protects Americans' security and liberty."

State Murder

After the execution of Stanley Tookie Williams on Tuesday, 647 inmates remain on California's death row. Governor Schwarzenegger does not seem predisposed to grant clemency to any of them; his pro-death Republican supporters would not forgive him if he displayed any doubt about the state's right to deadly vengeance. The next person scheduled to die, on January 17, is Clarence Ray Allen, 75 years old and sick with diabetes and atherosclerosis, who was convicted of hiring a hit man to kill three people while he was in prison—not exactly the most attractive guy around.

Meanwhile, in Virginia, two men were exonerated this week on the basis of old DNA evidence; they had completed prison sentences for sexual assault and are now requesting complete pardons. Guilt is rarely certain, and no one deserves to be murdered by the state, however unattractive he may be.

The Conscience of the Continent

The United States representatives remained uncooperative to the end at the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference in Montreal. Addressing the Bush administration, Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin had remonstrated that "there is such a thing as a global conscience, and now is the time to listen to it." State Department spokesman Adam Ereli responded: "If you want to talk about global consciousness, I'd say there's one country that is focused on action, that is focused on dialogue, that is focused on cooperation and is focused on helping the developing world. And that's the United States."

Ereli's blustering retort missed the whole point. Martin spoke of conscience, and Ereli (less rigorously) of consciousness. Apparently moral values—or at least the words used to speak of them—are unfamiliar to Bush appointees. Nevertheless, the rest of the nations attending the conference made some real progress.

Russian Dancers

Jon Carroll, inimitable columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has a wonderful take on the film "Ballets Russes":

Imagine, if you will, that there's a large room where we keep all the fabulous people. These fabulous people have anecdotes, none of which you have heard. They also have great clothes, amazing jewelry, joie de vivre coming out their ears and just enough ego to make them believe that what they have to say is worth hearing.

You'd visit that room, yes? Maybe only once a week, because it might get overwhelming, but you'd keep coming back. It'd be like the Personality Genome Project.… So here's the thing: There's a documentary movie called "Ballets Russes" that appears to be have been entirely filmed in the room of fabulous people. That's not the only reason you should see it -- and you really should see it -- but it's one of them.

Add Carroll's reasons to mine, and you've got to see that movie, even if you're not a fan of the dance. No more excuses.

Singing through the Nightmare

Tony Kushner wrote Angels in America at a time when AIDS was an untameable monster, sure to devour all of the best and the brightest. Maurice Sendak created Where the Wild Things Are in recognition that from childhood we all live with monsters we must learn to tame.

Now Tony Taccone of Berkeley Rep has brought Kushner and Sendak together to resurrect two simple, intense dramas that speak of hope in a time of terror, Comedy on the Bridge and Brundibar. They are for adults as well as children, and they resonate for our time while evoking the fearful 1930s. World War Two and the Holocaust were just around the corner when the two short operas were written, and Brundibar was performed in the Terezín concentration camp by Jewish children who were later murdered in Auschwitz. As 50 million people were dying around the world, even the least of the victims continued to sing of resistance and hope. The effect, at this distance in time and with our awareness of contemporary monsters, is chilling—and yet deeply affecting. The production runs through December 28.

Comedy on the Bridge is a one-act antiwar opera by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů, composed in 1935, as Nazism and Communism loomed on each side of the small countries of Eastern Europe. The absurdity of war traps a group of innocent civilians between two warring armies. One by one, they try to cross the bridge between enemy lines, and they are denied admission to  the other side and then denied return to their homeland. The paperwork is not in order, or no one is allowed to cross the bridge, or … any excuse for the guards to exercise arbitrary military power. The shells and bombs begin to fall, and the bridge offers no shelter. Finally, in an equally arbitrary development, the war is over.

The music is serviceable but forgettable, and the story is too banal to be truly frightening, but the singer-actors are excellent, especially Anjani Bhimani as the charming shopgirl Popelka and Martin Vidnovic as the clueless sausage-maker Bedronyi. Members of the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, directed by Valerie Gebert, play with spirit and precision (they are placed under the stage, like beneficent trolls). Kushner's English adaptation is clear and amusing, and Sendak's design has his trademark vivid impressionism.

Brundibar is another matter altogether, a work of transcendent genius. It's a crystalline fairy tale of children against bad adults, poor against greedy rich, good against evil; and the audience, young and old, was swept up in its archetypal rightness. As Kushner says, it "is a beautiful children's story, extolling the virtues of courage and cooperation and collective action against tyranny." Even the animals join in the children's revolt, the dog and cat and sparrow helping the children fight against injustice and poverty.

Russian Dancers

In the nineteen-thirties and -forties, the only taste of classical ballet many Americans had was when the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo came to town. Or, sometimes, the Original Ballet Russe. Both companies were descendants of Serge Diaghilev's truly original Ballets Russes, the groundbreaking émigré company based in Paris that toured from 1909 to 1929 and that counted among its artistic contributors Stravinsky, Picasso, and Matisse and among its dancers Pavlova and Nijinsky.

But the daughter companies brought fresh life to the art, battling for dancers and audiences in London and around the world. George Balanchine hired the three "baby ballerinas" in the photo in 1932, and throughout the period both companies spread the religion of ballet, laying the groundwork for New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, and many regional troupes. The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo traveled throughout Europe and North America, and the Original Ballet Russe spent significant time as well in South America and Australia. Everywhere they performed, new fans and aspiring dancers were created.

Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller have caught the magic of those times in their brilliant documentary "Ballets Russes." They interviewed dancers, many still articulate and vibrant in their eighties and nineties, and they gathered amazing footage of these same dancers performing in their prime. The result is a great dance film and a great story of human endeavor. The history is brought to life in the archival clips of young, athletic artists, and the story gains resonance in the memories of their older selves. You don't have to be a balletomane to enjoy this multilayered film.

On Saturday night, Goldfine and Geller came to a showing in Albany, California, and answered questions afterward. The project began, they said, when they were told of a planned 2000 reunion in New Orleans, probably the last for many of the older dancers. They began interviewing, and soon realized they had a powerful story and wonderfully photogenic subjects to tell it. With humor and nostalgia, with sharp memories and critical acumen, the dancers remembered their years on the stage. And Goldfine and Geller found the filmed records of those years.

The companies finally foundered in the fifties and sixties, brought down by artistic rivalries, stodgy management, insufficient capital, and a stale repertoire. But they had planted the seeds, and Balanchine among others reaped the fruits.

"Ballets Russes" is playing now in Albany, San Francisco, Irvine, Beverly Hills, and West Los Angeles, California; Boston and Waltham, Massachusetts; and Seattle, New York, and Chicago. Check the website for other openings throughout the US and Canada (click "where to see it"). But if it's not coming to your town soon, put it high on your Netflix queue. This is not a film to miss.

Update here.

Glorious Summer

In her Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of Richard III, director Libby Appel has conceived a theatrical vision of pure evil, and James Newcomb as Richard has brought that vision to terrifying life. It's a triumph. Newcomb's would-be king is a force of nature, nature at its least benign. But this production is not just about Richard—it is also about the sorrowful women who have lost husbands and sons in the interminable Wars of the Roses. Appel's chiaroscuro technique, unusual in a production of this play, brings all the characters to three-dimensional life and makes Richard's amoral lust for power as contemporary and real as the Machiavellian schemes of the Bush White House.

Richard, dressed in Elizabethan black but perched on modern forearm crutches, begins the play ironically, seeming to praise his brother Edward, the latest monarch to grab England's throne:

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

The summer sun casts the darkest shade, and Richard is darkness itself—the Jungian Shadow made overt. It was politic of Shakespeare to depict him as a monster, since it was Queen Elizabeth's grandfather who finally defeated him. But Richard is often played merely as a cardboard villain, the Shadow who has no Shadow; and the play's universe then shrinks to the size of a melodrama. Newcomb expands the universe by making Richard's actions and motivations, however evil, vivid and comprehensible—full of justifications and rationalizations, in the manner of someone we might know, or even, fleetingly, our own worst selves. He has been treated badly, a cripple and a hunchback—the Americans with Disabilities Act had not been enacted in 1485—so his incapacity for trust and his vengeful fury are all too human.

Cakes and Ale

When I was an actor, I assumed that the play revolved around whatever character I was playing. That may not have been sound dramaturgy, but it did wonders for character development. The Tempest? The story is that Caliban lived happily with some wild creatures on an island, and when a big storm cast the overly civilized Prospero and his friends on shore, like typical Europeans they started acting as though they owned the place. The Tempest is a play about nature, slavery, and colonization. 

As for Henry IV, Part I, it is true that Owen Glendower, the last true Prince of Wales, appears in only one fiery scene, along with some representatives of that neighboring principality to the east, but that is no argument against his centrality. Glendower is endlessly fascinating: a magician, a seer, and a crafty war strategist. Prince Hal, Hotspur, Falstaff—all the other characters pale into insignificance. The play, I reasoned (since I was Glendower), is really a study of  the Welsh prince's career and the drama of his succession. It does seem odd that Shakespeare wasted so many scenes in England on the questions of duty and honor and restraint—perhaps it was his way of commenting on Glendower's Welsh passion, clearly the still point of that turning world.

Then there's Twelfth Night, which is Feste's play—or so it seemed to me when I played the jester long ago. Puns and jests, songs and foolery, nothing taken seriously, especially not the overwrought lovers or the Puritanical steward Malvolio. Feste is a twopence philosopher: "To see this age! A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit: how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!" Witty language is Feste's weapon against both hypocrisy and narcissism.

Peter Amster has directed a joyous, rollicking Twelfth Night at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, but it's not Feste's play. It's a more traditional reading in which the lovers—Orsino, Olivia, and Viola—are simultaneously taken seriously and comically when they proclaim their undying love. They are amusing, especially Orsino and Olivia, when their free-floating affection fixes on a different target. But they are like us in their intended seriousness, so we forgive them as we forgive ourselves. And Amster's traditional reading of the purely comic scenes, with Toby Belch, Andrew Aguecheek, Feste, and Maria making fun of the dour Malvolio, is light and fluid, providing scope for the rapid-fire jesting: "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?"

The Eyes Have It

The Magic Theatre in San Francisco is staging three interesting new plays in repertory through June 19 under the banner "Hothouse '05":

• The Rules of Charity, by John Belluso, directed by Chris Smith
• 3F, 4F, by Victor Lodato, directed by Pam MacKinnon
• The Black Eyed, by Betty Shamieh, directed by Jessica Heidt

Artistic director Chris Smith has done a good job keeping the new-play tradition alive at the two Fort Mason stages, and The Black Eyed is a worthy addition to the Magic's list of memorable productions. It's set in an anteroom of heaven, and the four characters are Palestinian women who have arrived upstairs prematurely due to violence, their own or someone else's. It's always struggle and war, from Delilah, whose Philistine (that is, proto-Palestinian) dalliance with Samson ended badly, to the contemporary architect (unnamed) who almost stopped a bomber on her airplane but didn't know quite what to say. And in this struggle with Israel (and the West) the Palestinians are always victims, just as in their struggles with men these women are always victims.

But they are strong, admirable people in their defeat, still defiant as they tell their stories, just arrived in heaven. As written by Shamieh, and as performed with fire and precision by the actors, the women are three-dimensional characters, thoughtful, finely differentiated. 

Aiesha is their leader—or is it jailer?—and she forbids the other three from entering the adjacent martyrs' hall, where each would like to visit an earthly acquaintance. She is emotionally closed and sneering, an unpleasant presence who finally explains the tragedy that shaped her. Nora El Samahy plays Aiesha with controlled fury and contempt for everyone else, though with insufficient modulation.

Delilah remembers how she used her voluptuous wiles on Samson and then came to love him. Sofia Ahmad throws herself into the role, and her sexy dance tells the complexities of her wavering loyalties better than words.

Tamam lost a brother when she failed to discourage him from becoming a suicide bomber, and she is angry with him, with herself, and with all the powers that be for such an impossible situation. Bridgette Loriaux is particularly strong, maintaining a completely believable focus and intensity from beginning to end.

The architect is mostly quiet as the others tell their stories, but her inhibitions and lack of fluency melt away as she remembers an embarrassing job interview, a failed relationship, and her climactic airplane trip. Atosa Babaoff creates a touching portrait of an introvert with an active imagination.

Shamieh has patched the women's stories together with dance, song, and jokes, but the play is too much a series of set speeches rather than a real drama. The abstract, bloodless relationships do not take wing, and that keeps the promising individual stories from cohering into a greater whole. There are several moments of inspired writing—the song celebrating peace when Israel and Palestine become pals in the new nation Palael, and the architect's daydream of an entire life with her imagined husband before the man even asks her out for coffee, among others.

The political ideas expressed, too, are subtle and complex, each woman making her own sense of the Palestinians' plight. But the characters are static and detached from each other, and Heidt's stagecraft is schematic and over-choreographed. Only in the final scene, as the architect breaks through emotionally and is able to leave the anteroom, does the emotional subtext mesh with the action, and then it's almost enough to make it all work.

Shamieh has attempted a very difficult task—to create a dramatic afterworld that throws light on the messy, disparate tales of violent everyday lives—and she almost succeeds. The experiment, in any case, is interesting to watch, particularly given the strong performances. 

Note: I haven't seen the other two plays now at the Magic; but judging from Chris Smith's recent track record, I'd say you should check them out. At best, a great evening in the theatre. At worst, an interesting experiment, with very good actors doing their thing.

I Am My Own Wife in SF!

Doug Wright's luminescent play I Am My Own Wife opens on Tuesday, May 3, and runs through May 29 at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco. It's the same Tony-winning production I saw in New York last year, directed by the versatile Moisés Kaufman and performed by the astonishing Jefferson Mays. I recommend it.

• Here's my review, from April 2004.
• Here's a fascinating interview with Mays, by Steven Winn of the San Francisco Chronicle.
• Here's the production website, for facts and background.
• And here's where you can buy tickets online.

After the run in SF, the play moves south, to Los Angeles in June and July and to La Jolla in August.

The play is, in part, an investigation of how one survives a repressive regime, and these days we could all use a few suggestions about that. It's also about the restorative capabilites of art. While writing the play, Wright saw a fragment of the Berlin Wall on which someone had painted the words "Art Survives." It does.

May the Farce Be with You

Geoff Hoyle is one of a kind, a clown equally at home in physical slapstick and verbal japery, a showman whose multilayered wit hits everyone's funnybone. For Better or Worse, Hoyle's adaptation of two domestic comedies by Georges Feydeau, is at the Berkeley Rep through April 24. It's an evening of delightful froth, expertly directed by David Ira Goldstein. Go see it, you'll feel better.

Hoyle first comes on stage as academic master of ceremonies for the evening, a smarmy "professor of philology and semiotics from Cal State Yreka," pleased to bring his ersatz scholarship to the people of Berkeley. He explains the rôle of Feydeau in the French belle époque. (He translates knowingly: "In English, that's belle époque."). He smiles conspiratorially, as sure of his mistakes as his facts.

After the amusing introduction, the first comedy begins. Hoyle transforms himself into Bastien Follavoine, the harried husband of the very pregnant Julie, played with caustic verve by Sharon Lockwood. Julie's unreasonable demands, always extreme and unpredictable, multiply as the delivery approaches. And Bastien's ineffectual efforts to do what she wants always fail—walk in circles, sit down, squeeze her hand so hard she won't notice the contractions—nothing works. He fails also at his intermittent efforts to please himself—eat a meal, have a drink of wine, sort his business papers—she always interrupts.

The entirely predictable stereotypes play out, but Feydeau's mastery of specific and recognizable modes of conjugal attack keep every parry and thrust fresh: narcissism, passive aggression, imputation of guilt, willful misunderstanding, secrets real and imagined, false confessions. Nothing really mean, much less evil—it's just a French version of Dagwood and Blondie, taken to a new level of rancor and misunderstanding. Hoyle and Lockwood keep it real, almost within the bounds of believable realism, with their athletic physical comedy and impeccable timing.

The second play takes place six years later, and the Follavoine's child, Toto, has become a pampered brat prone to constipation—or perhaps imagined constipation, as mother Julie insists on daily regularity in all things. This time the conjugal battles revolve around differing child-rearing theories, powerful laxatives, and the ever-present slop bucket.

There are complications. A potential business partner arrives, the self-important M. Chouilloux, with the authority to grant Bastien the lucrative chamber-pot contract for the entire French army—but only if the pots are unbreakable. Bastien demonstrates by tossing one across the room. It breaks. Julie does not cooperate, too worried about Toto's irregularity to dress for company. In short order, M. Chouilloux is insulted by Toto, accidentally takes the child's laxative, is told by Julie of his own wife's infidelity, and leaves in fury, taking with him Bastien's dream of chamber-pot riches. Jarion Monroe plays the role with proper pomposity.

In fact, all the actors are full of over-the-top life, mugging, strutting, fleeing for the toilet. In one unforgettable sequence, Bastien, frustrated with Julie's continued uncooperativeness, whirls, spins, leaps, and bounces across the stage, finally ending under the desk, with his upside-down face toward the audience in a rictus of oppressed husbandliness. Hoyle is brilliant. And between the two plays, now as the dotty professor again, Hoyle shows his improvisational skills, conducting a hilarious unscripted audience-participation playlet.

York Kennedy's lighting design is crisp but unobtrusive. Kent Dosey's set and David Kay Mickelsen's costumes are imaginatively early-20th-century haute-bourgeois, with more tatters and rot as time passes. The Follavoines are simply not making it: they had to sell their copy of the Gericault "Raft of the Medusa" by the time of the later play, and there's not even new wallpaper to cover the gap.

That doesn't matter, of course. This is farce, a universe where the worse—the bickering, the tatters, the irregularity—is what makes the better possible. It's a very funny universe.