'13 Rue de L'Amour': Unlucky in Love
Olney's Attempt at a Feydeau Farce Gets All the Gags but Misses the Fun
By Nelson Pressley
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, May 21, 2007
Farce is a harsh mistress. Treat her badly and you're apt to find yourself standing in the street with your face slapped and your trousers gone.
At Olney Theatre Center, director John Going runs around on French master Georges Feydeau's "13 Rue de L'Amour," a classic shell game of adultery. You know the type: A cheating wife darts into a closet to avoid being caught by her hubby, who obliviously trades lewd winks with his best friend before bounding across the hall for his own tryst.
The staging isn't exactly frothy at Olney. It's frosty, actually -- mocking and brittle. As Gustave Moricet (the lecherous best friend) and Leontine Duchotel (the soon-to-be-guilty wife), Jeffries Thaiss and Ashley West pivot their heads like marionettes, delivering their lines to the audience with wide-eyed surprise. It feels more like Ionesco than Feydeau.
And it doesn't matter, because unfortunately the actors have already been upstaged by James Wolk's set, which features the wavy shapes and heavy outlines of Toulouse-Lautrec. In this scene, it's lavender and pink and looks like a melting ice cream cake.
Even Liz Covey's costumes have vivid highlights on the piping and seams. Can farce stand all this extra emphasis? It certainly seems to undermine the (ahem) delicacy of feeling, all those wounded egos and rising libidos propelling the characters out of the fruit-colored home of the Duchotels and toward the mixed-up love affairs awaiting at 13 Rue de L'Amour.
There, for a moment, the show bawdily sticks out its tongue, thanks to the delightfully dirty-minded turn of Halo Wines. "Ah," Wines murmurs as the heavily accented Madame Spritzer, a woman past her philandering prime, "de sofa -- vere de maneuvers begin!" The perpetually strange design tries to camouflage her -- in this scene, the set is blood red, and so is her dress -- yet Wines stands out anyway, quickening the show's pulse with her infectiously happy vulgarity.
The rest of the cast is stuck in a mechanical broadside of farce; it's as if Going has wound them all as tightly as possible and left them to clatter along. Timing is king: Doors slam and pants are dropped (and mistakenly swapped) with precision. All the near-misses and blasted discoveries land as scheduled.
But the production is playing at farce, not playing it. Footlights rim the stage, actors' cheeks are rouged an inch deep, mention of rain merits a conspicuously stagy deluge. Everything's in quotation marks. It's a flattening approach that steamrolls distinctions. As Moricet, Thaiss doesn't sound much different from Lawrence Redmond's Justinien Duchotel, who barks and marches with the same cadence as West. None of them seems genuinely interested in sex -- not even Nick DePinto's Jean-Pierre, who leaps in and out of bed in the altogether.
Ethan T. Bowen actually seems to be alive as an enthusiastic police inspector (think Clouseau, only a degree smarter), and Patricia Hurley plays a maid with an amusingly saucy pucker. The rest is like iron. Farce may demand precision, but it shouldn't be robotic.
