STAGE: Cuckolds' Chuckles

13 Rue de L'Amour
By Georges Feydeau
Translated by Mawby Green and Ed Feilbert
Directed by John Going
Olney Theatre Center
Through June 10

At the beginning of a farce by the Belle Epoque French dramatist Georges Feydeau, all is false to the point of revealing much that is true.

That paradox is key to the current film Avenue Montaigne, in which a subplot involves an actress starring in one of Feydeau’s plays. She and other characters debate whether or not Feydeau’s works are purely comical or involve some deeper psychology. In the film, the question is left fittingly unresolved. Because like a cocktail, farce seems bubbly and insubstantial and delightful when done properly, making you think nothing of it. But when you drink one, or see one, that’s been created improperly, you realize how easily the concoction falls short. It’s too sweet, or too light, or too heavy, or too weak, or too strong. Neither the drama nor the drink has fully succeeded if you find yourself mulling whether or not it has fully succeeded.

So I think those on both sides of the film’s argument are correct. Yes, Feydeau’s farces are purely comical, because they are whipped up around elements of falseness that delineate truths about human weaknesses. And yes, they’re deeply psychological, because the spotting of those weaknesses, and the creation of comic vehicles light enough to make their exposition palatable, depend on great insight into human character.

Case closed. Curtain opened—on Olney Theatre Center’s vibrant, tangy production of Feydeau’s 13 Rue de L’Amour, in a translation by Mawby Green and Ed Feilbert, and directed by John Going. As I mentioned, all is false—not just in the action on stage involving a veritable tournament of infidelities, but in the presentation as a whole. (Whether that's the best course is debatable, but this production so commits to flaunting the work's artificiality that I was ultimately sold by that very resoluteness. I suspect not everyone will be, and I could be equally sold, I bet, on a resolute production with a more low-key naturalistic strategy. Let a hundred aesthetics bloom, is my feeling.)

Reflecting the outrageousness of the action is an outrageous set by James Wolk, like a stylized illustration come to life—somewhere between the drawings in one of Ludwig Bemelman’s Madeleine tales and the fantasy dance-sequence sets of An American in Paris. Art nouveau with traces of surrealism and story-book whimsy, all pinks and reds and whites, right up to the ceiling in the form of a false proscenium that frames the curtain.

Costumiere Jeanne Bland matches these improbabilities with goofily gaudy, but strangely snazzy, period dress, which is all the more appropriate because clothing (pants in particular)—misplaced, left behind, and unexpectedly exchanged—plays a prominent role in the story.

Hmm. About that story. Well, let’s give it a try. In and around Paris at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Moricet, a cad doctor, wishes to lure Leontine Duchotel into an affair. She wants to remain true to her husband, Justinien Duchotel, believing him true to her. Moricet plants seeds of doubt on that score, and events soon plant further doubts still. Meanwhile, the Duchotels’ nephew Jean-Pierre, a college student, is having an affair of his own. A series of impossible—and thus in the farce context, inevitable—coincidences bring matters to a head in an apartment building on the Rue de L’Amour maintained by a fallen German countess, Madame Spritzer, who enjoys generating gossip-worthy complications even more than she enjoys gossip. Complicating matters further is Monsieur Duchotel’s not-so-close close friend Birabeau, who is trying to entrap his estranged wife in flagrante delicto, and several Cops de Keystone pursuing Birabeau’s case.

“There it is,” Moricet says to his conquest regarding his apartment on the Rue de L’Amour, “our own little sanctuary away from the world.” Little does he know. After all, the street number is 13.

So, got all that? Not to worry. It really doesn’t matter. I mean, it does to the frenzied stirring of the plot pot, but not beyond that. Of course, that stirring, like a dessert chef’s whisk, is all, and Going’s got a good whisk wrist, as well as fine ingredients in the combination of his assured technical team and a fabulously lively cast.

Ashley West captures Leontine’s many dispositions, from flirty to fiery, and indignant to indulgent. Jeffries Thaiss is a lovable rogue as Moricet, hoisted repeatedly on his own petard as chaos proves even more powerful than his wily bachelor techniques. As the spidery Justinien Duchotel, Lawrence Redmond is a pleasure, wrapping himself ever deeper into the inextricable layers of his silky web of lies. Credited in the program is a dialect coach (Elizabeth van den Berg), and she no doubt spent some time with the hilarious Halo Wines, as Madame Spritzer. The accent, like the rouge and the absurd hairdo and the dress and the performance generally, is a bit thick—and wonderfully so. The Madame is a broad interpreted broadly, in the great tradition of stage comedy’s lesser characters writ large. Vincent Clark's Birabeau is sympathetically bumbling. Nick DePinto as Jean-Pierre and Patricia Hurley as the servant Marie also shine in their supporting roles, which require as exact, if not as sustained, a sense of timing as the principal ones.

The action is superbly brisk, blocking and dialogue spun together like concurrent tops that bump into each other and send off sparks. Lines that don’t generate guffaws of their own accord conspire, as matters unfold, to bring those whirling tops of speech and space into a variety of giddy gyrations and collisions, sometimes literally.

And if at the start of a Feydeau play all is false to the point of revealing much that is true—Remember? That was our beginning assertion.—then by the end the reverse could be said. By the play's conclusion, all is true to the point of revealing much that is false. That's the twist; and the untwist.

See? Pure comedy. Pure psychology. Impure fun.

-Alexander C. Kafka



Photos by Stan Barouh, courtesy of Olney Theatre Center:

1: Jeffries Thaiss and Ashley West
2: Nick DePinto and Jeffries Thaiss
3: Halo Wines and Ashley West