Laughing to keep from crying The Gamm’s Red Noses is bursting with marvelous moments BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Red Noses By Peter Barnes. Directed by Peter Sampieri. With Anthony Estrella, Steve Kidd, Jeanine Kane, Sam Babbitt, Normand Beauregard, Ben Johnson, Chris Byrnes, Wendy Overly, Jen Swain, Casey Seymour Kim, Kelly Seigh, Paul Scharf, Matthew Furtado, David Rabinow, Tom Epstein, Georgia Cohen, Jed Hancock-Brainerd, Andrew Morissette, John Lincoln, Ashley Burgess, Courtney Edge, and Scott Winters. At Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre through February 27.

Life and death. Suffering and joy. Violence and pacifism. Red Noses, by Peter Barnes, leaves nothing out. And now the Gamm Theatre is painting each theme colorfully, sticking them on a merry-go-round and sending them atwirl.

The bubonic plague as a subject for comedy? Who knew? Trinity Rep director Peter Sampieri, for one. While not letting us lose sight of the seriousness of the setting — mid-14th-century Europe saw one in three scythed down by the Black Death — he has taken these 22 talented actors and coaxed out some marvelous moments.

We follow the travels and travails of Father Flote (Anthony Estrella), an itinerant priest in France, an epileptic who is inspired with the notion that suffering is, by definition, relieved by laughter. As he encounters strangers and befriends them, he assembles a troupe that wears clowns’ red noses and performs funny plays for people. But will the pope, then in his palace in Avignon, see them as a threat to reliance on the Church?

The dirt-strewn set by Michael McGarty ingeniously (and bravely) has a life-size crucifix at the end of the stage — but facing the wall. (Gotta love the ambiguity: Jesus either as front Man for the suffering characters or a god who has turned his back on them.) Marilyn Salvatore’s costume design is crucial to the effect, maintaining the contrasting moods of Boschean peasant rags and opulent ecclesiastical finery.

Such a carnival. We get "When You’re Smiling" sung by conjoined twins who have three legs between them. We get Black Ravens wearing long-beaked masks, who "grease" victims with plague pus to have more bodies to rob. We get sarcastic lepers dropping body parts like pocket change, and surviving gold merchants carting off lucre like giddy kids with candy.

Ensemble work is all about inventive stage business and playing off the other actors’ inspirations. This is the sort of episodic seriocomic lark that lives or dies on actors making picaresque characters vivid. We’ve got to hear the heartbeats.

As usual at Gamm, most come across loud and clear. Artistic director Estrella is disadvantaged as the good Father — he has a single gentle note to toot, but he nuances Flote’s responses to the challenges that compassion confronts. (Asked to draw a sword in 10 seconds or die, what would you do?) Other characters get to change, to grow into the priest’s saintly gentleness. One is Grez (Steve Kidd), the head of a band of flagellants who go around scourging themselves bloody, a "brotherhood of pain" exhorting with their reductio ad absurdum penance. Sister Marguerite (Jeanine Kane), reluctantly saved from a sexual assault she’d been looking forward to, eventually softens from being the cynic who pulled a convent over herself after her lover died.

There are too many such characters, and good performances, to mention. The sonorous Barrymore voice of Sam Babbitt gets apt projection through Pope Clement VI. But the actor eventually adds an even deeper dimension, actually making us sympathize with a man who doesn’t want the church "driven out of the salvation business" by competitors who demonstrate that redemption can be free. Normand Beauregard makes us jealous as the brigand and erstwhile freelance soldier Brodin, who shows us that a warrior can have a happy death without a sword in his hand.

But there’s one character, and actor, who stands out from the rest. The playwright sets up the mute Sonnerie as the Red Noses troupe’s beloved clowns’ clown, communicating only through the bells he wears. But Ben Johnson does something transcendent with the role. Before the play he prepares us for his improv skills, playing with audience members and pantomiming a hilarious request to shut off cell phones. Later, whether miming mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a bug, jumping rope as a newborn sprouting an umbilical cord, or waxing poignant in his final scene, he adds more than is written down. The simple wave of joy that such a performance nudges through an audience may not amount to much when you think of tsunamis. But that is the point, my friends.

It was no fluke that British playwright Peter Barnes, who died last year at 73, could so successfully meld profound issues with arrow-swift humor in his 1985 Red Noses. He adapted another of his plays for the 1972 film The Ruling Class, which contains one of the most mordant lines in all of comedy or theology. Playing an earl who is as mad as an archbishop’s hatter, Peter O’Toole is asked why he is sure he is God. Well, he explains, one day I was praying and realized that I was talking to myself.

Thank you, Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre, for reminding us that such prayers can be answered.