Perfect pair

Duclos and Kay team up in We Won't Pay!

by Bill Rodrgiguez

Have you ever noticed how in farces -- whether I Love Lucy reruns or Molière -- it's the women who tend to be the clever problem-solvers, while the men tend to preen and be the buffoons?

In Janice Duclos and Phyllis Kay, Trinity Repertory Company has two veterans of comedic heavy lifting. That was evident during a recent rehearsal of Dario Fo's We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!, a knock-down-drag-out farce if there ever was one. At one point, Kay is hiding an unconscious and visibly "pregnant" policeman in a wardrobe before her husband comes home. There is surgical tubing sticking out of his mouth, which has inflated his stomach (don't ask), and Kay experiments with ways to lift him up and get him upright and into the closet. Duclos pitches in, playing Ethel Mertz to her Lucy, a worried sidekick helping her get away with the latest scheme. The pace wasn't the finger-snapping tempo of a polished production, but you had your yelps, your grunts, all your comical elements in outsized proportions.

Watching all the huffing and puffing, director Amanda Dehnert wears a big relaxed smile, like an audience member seeing it unfold on opening night. After the scene is done, she makes some suggestions about the timing of an entrance and where an actor should be when. But she seems confident that before previews in 11 days, the inventive troupe will assemble this anarchic sprawl into clockwork precision.

This farce is the most frequently exported one by Italian national treasure Fo who, with wife Franca Rama, are known for satirical theater whose grin bares pointy teeth, on guard against social oppression. The set-up of We Won't Pay!, written in the early '70s, involves two wives who get caught up in a supermarket food riot and have to hide the stolen food from their out-of-work husbands.

Speaking in the dressing room area during a meal break, Kay described the mental calculations she was going through in that hide-the-body scene. "It was the first time we were really dealing with all the things we have to do," she said. "Now, what can you do with a long piece of tubing coming out of a guy's mouth? Does the body fall on me? Now we're trying to get him up. The door won't close -- it hits me in the face."

"The thing is," Duclos added, halting the progress of her sandwich, "in performance it will probably be different every night. Because there are some audiences who will eat that up and you can feel it, and it can go on longer. And there are others where you know, `OK, we've got to wrap this up.' "

Kay coughed out a laugh of recognition.

The audience is another character for them to react against, Duclos observed, noting that director Dehnert doesn't want them to back away from opportunities to improvise during a performance.

They both have been in Trinity's A Christmas Carol every year, the theater's annual cash cow. Since Kay has played several parts in it several times, she likes to find possibilities for being funny that others have overlooked, she said.

Ironically, the source of the humor in a melodrama like the Dickens tale and a farce like the Fo play is anything but funny. I mentioned to them a British author John Mortimer's observation that "Farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute."

Kay nods. "I used to use the same monologue for auditions," she said, whether for a serious role or a comedy. "It was from Middle of the Night, by Paddy Chayefsky. She's having a nervous breakdown. So a nervous breakdown can be very funny or sad, depending on your spin on it."

"There's so much pressure when you think, Oh, how can I make this be funny? Kiss of death," Kay continues. She turned to Duclos. "Don't you think?"

"Oh, yeah. Absolutely," came the response. "The best performances I've ever seen in a tragedy have been actors who were able to find humor. And if they're in a comedy, if they're able to find the tragic elements to it. Because comedy hurts. Comedy's pain. A lot of it. You know what I mean? Comedy's pain. Comedy's hostility. It's all those things that get you right here." Duclos placed a fist at her gut.

The two 30something actors are Trinity Rep veterans now, as much a part of the place as the Majestic Theatre brickwork, but each used to be a mainstay of Off-Trinity companies. In 1984, Duclos signed on from Wickenden Gate Theatre, which she co-founded. That was back in the Adrian Hall days, when Trinity had a rather snobbish attitude toward the many small theaters around town, so it was a particular coup to come aboard then. In the summer of 1992, Duclos wrote and directed a very funny series of sketches called One for the Money, in which she was helpless-tears-hilarious doing a straight presentation of the overwrought "Attention must be paid!" cemetery scene in Death of a Salesman. She has a merciless eye for theatrical falsity. One tough cookie.

In Rhode Island, Kay had acted mostly at 2nd Story Theatre before she joined Trinity in 1991. She appeared in the films Smithereens and Mermaids plus Federal Hill, where she was dead-on as a high-haired Cranston beautician. As anyone knows who saw her as the distraught wife in Angels In America, she can get to your heart as surely as to your funny bone. And when it comes to playing tragedy and comedy as flip sides, as she discussed above, I was struck by how she did just that in the 1995 Trinity production of Pierre Corneille's The Illusion. "Phyllis Kay," I wrote at the time, "deepens as the succession of maids, hilarious when mischievous and affecting when matters turn serious."

Nope, it's not by chance that these two actors are consistently as good as they are. I don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to seeing how Fred Sullivan gets stuffed into a closet. I'm sure I'll laugh, I'll cry.

We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! is at Trinity April 9 through May 16.