KCMETROPOLIS.org
Kansas City's Online Journal of the Performing Arts

Classic French farce possesses all the precariousness of a bullfight with the precision of a David Mamet play. The characters are put in some form of peril, usually marital; the actors must summon up the verbal dexterity of speed talkers for whom a missed cue leaves a joke flat. As with other things French-cooking and love-it looks easier than it is. American playwrights like Neil Simon have a rat-a-tat television rhythm to their writing alternating between satire and sentiment that deprives their comedy of escalating to the upper reaches: French farce has its physical component as well, of doors slamming and characters running face to face into one another and scrambling backward. One understands why the French film critics of the Sixties saw Jerry Lewis as one of their heirs and an auteur: he stopped at nothing.

If farce was historically considered juvenile, performed after a drama and then a monologue of some sort, its tenets-small cast, a trifle of accident or coincidence, compactness of scenes-still applies, with contemporary variations. In the Kansas City Repertory Theatre's version of Georges Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear, which premièred on May 22 (directed by Gary Griffin), in a Marx-Bros-like adaptation by David Ives, characters spin like human revolving doors and witty remarks are traded faster than shares during a Wall Street frenzy. Ives, a versatile author who has his own stage credits both as a playwright and a musical collaborator, as well as that of several clever children's books, follows other translator-adapters of the 1907 farce (such as Rumpole author John Mortimer). Yet, he has not so much updated Feydeau, which would be akin to updating Le Sacre du Printemps to make the music snappier, as he has brought out the hoot in the bourgeoisie. It is Woody Allen's New Yorkers without the Jewish jokes.

All it takes is a pair of suspenders anonymously sent in the mail to Victor Emmanuel Chandebise (Broadway actor John Scherer), the gentleman of a fine household in Paris, but opened by his wife, Raymonde (Broadway and film actress Carol Halstead), to set the pandemonium in motion. The suspenders, found at a louche motel, belong to Chandebise but were loaned out to his nephew Camille (Jonathan Root), an agitated young man with a speech impediment, whose lack of verbal clarity does not apparently prevent his active nightlife. When Raymonde and her best friend, Lucienne Homenides (Anne Nathan, a Broadway Sondheim veteran), compose an over-the-top billet doux to entrap Chandebise, the mistakes multiply alongside the jokes, double-entendre and otherwise.

The inverted logic of the play is espoused by the rapscallion Tournel (John Pasha), a good friend of Chandebise, who woos Raymonde with the plan that if her husband is unfaithful then her own affair is in order, but if he is faithful then her own affair will be good for her. The second act rises to order as one of the characters is discovered by the audience to be an exact duplicate of another; the raison d'être does not matter: a farce is a farce is a farce. Feydeau wrote at a time of changes-British suffragettes stormed Parliament, Einstein's Theory of Relativity was published, a riot disrupted the Irish première of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World-though France was still governed by hierarchies, and so Feydeau's comedies were popular without shaking audiences out of their comfort levels. That would not happen until the opening of En attendant Godot, in 1953, which brought to bear the first existentialist farce.

A Flea in Her Ear, much like Michael Frayn's theatrical comedy Noises Off and Preston Sturges's 1948 movie Unfaithfully Yours, if about anything, is about the love of performing. The Rep cast takes dialogue that needs a specific Mel Brooksian mania and finds it; this is one of those ensembles that probably could entertain an audience with a Chinese takeout menu. As in many comedies, the oomph comes through the performances. Here, the director, following Ives's follow-through of Feydeau's original stage directions, calls upon his actors to play up to the audience; but never in such a way that we feel we have been mugged. My favorite moment the entire night might have been toward the end, when all of the actors have fled the stage for one reason or another, and for thirty seconds or so there is no one onstage; the joke takes a moment to roll through the theatre. I think it comes from our pausing to reflect on all the tumult that has come and gone: a comic nervous breakdown.

The evident pleasure taken by the actors is something David Ives need not translate from the French. Mark Robbins's performance as the cunning Doctor Finache, who helps Chandebise to a certain extent and stands as the play's voice of reason, fits securely along John Scherer's and Anne Nathan's. They make these turn-of-the-century stereotypes into individuals with passion and purpose (wrong-headed or right). John Pasha's Tournel is a delight, purring intimations of love like Pepé le Pew; while Tournel's opposite in love, the Spanish hothead Carlos Homenides, who suspects his Lucienne of improprieties, is played by Thom Rivera channeling the apoplectic bowler John Turturro played in The Big Lebowski.

This season at the Rep has found bracing drama in Tennessee Williams, musical innovation in Winesburg, Ohio, and now comedy for comedy's sake in A Flea in Her Ear. With so many offerings, any selection is bound to be eclectic: the question is whether the different plays clash or engage each other. By the audience's response on Opening Night, all's well that upends well.

REVIEW:
Kansas City Repertory Theatre
A Flea in Her Ear
by Georges Feydeau
Directed by Gary Griffin
Runs through June 7
Spencer Theatre, 4949 Cherry, Kansas City, MO
For tickets call 816-235-2700 or online at www.kcrep.org

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups.