Rafael Jaen provides the looped, layered, and fringed period costumes, which are slinky fun. More important, the acting on view is theatrical without being overdone, beginning with Debera Lund’s not unnatural Judith, whose airs are, well, airy. The rest of the family — Dafydd Rees’s avuncular David, Ross MacDonald’s glib Simon, and Lynn Guerra’s prettily peevish Sorrel — take their cues from her. The comedy derives from the fact that the guests — Robert Serrell’s dense knight of a Sandy, Cheryl Turski’s deliciously self-displaying Myra, Joel Colodner’s starchy yet frisky Richard, and Hannah Wilson’s increasingly bedraggled Jackie — have not been given a script.
If comedy is a machine, then A Flea in Her Ear is a Citroën engine to Hay Fever’s pencil sharpener. French farceur George Feydeau’s best-known work, the classic 1907 door slammer is being revved on the Williamstown Theatre Festival Mainstage (through August 10) in a saucy adaptation by American writer David Ives that greases the gears with some insouciant wordplay. Not that we’re talking Oscar Wilde here: in Tony winner John Rando’s slam-bam, careering-out-of-control staging, the play comes off like a naughty rendezvous with the Three Stooges, the characters behaving desperately while negotiating a roaring tempest of pinch, tickle, race-around, cover-up, and mistaken identity. Under the best of conditions, Feydeau’s intricately calibrated chaos is hard to pull off, and there were some technical problems opening night, among them a turntable with a mind of its own and a door that refused to stay slammed. But that WTF brings off this lavish farce at all with just two weeks’ rehearsal is a testament to skillful thespian dementia and a sadomasochistic physicality that might cause Actors Equity to lobby for combat pay.
Things start staidly enough, in the grand parlor of Victor Emmanuel Chandebise, hardworking bourgeois director of a Paris insurance company. That would seem to be a high-paying post, since, in Alexander Dodge’s set design, chez Chandebise is a towering palace of blue and white porcelain dominated by a chandelier taller than Tommy Tune. But the king of this castle, once an ardent husband, has developed an impotence problem. So when his suspenders are delivered with the return address of an infamous hotel, wife Raymonde suspects him of infidelity. Friend Lucienne suggests that Raymonde pen her husband an anonymous invitation to a tryst at the same establishment — originally the Hotel Coq d’Or, here the Frisky Puss Hotel — so as to entrap Victor if he shows up. Throw in Lucienne’s murderously jealous Spanish husband, Victor’s consonant-deprived nephew and womanizing best friend, and the polymorphously perverse family doctor and, once you get to the gilt-trimmed, candy-colored brothel of the second act, all hell breaks loose. And did I mention that the hotel’s middle-aged drunken busboy, Poche, is a dead ringer for Monsieur Chandebise?
The title of Ives’s best known work, All in the Timing, alone would seem to qualify him for the job of adapting Feydeau. The adapter might, however, have done some trimming: with intermissions, the three-act Flea is nearly three hours long and, however furious, can grow belabored. Moreover, the staging, though daredevil, sometimes lacks finesse. One character, encapsulating Feydeau’s theme of spiraling helplessness, likens himself to “a tiny piece of fluff blown around in a cyclone.” But the folks here are more banged than blown around.
