A fine farce

Brown's Flea is a door-slamming circus

by Bill Rodriguez

A FLEA IN HER EAR. By Georges Feydeau. Directed by Spencer Golub. With Ben Steinfeld, Miriam Silverman, Justine Williams, Michael Crane. At Brown University Theatre through October 24.

No bedroom farces are more breathlessly outrageous than those penned by Georges Feydeau. But the current Brown University Theatre has taken his most successful slammed-door circus, A Flea In Her Ear, and used it as a trampoline to launch some talented performers into antic outer space.

As he did in last year's boisterous rendition of Chekov's Three Sisters, director Spencer Golub has added a surrealistic dimension to the proceedings. That's an opportunity even more fertile in this wild and wonderful play, which even without extra helpings of imagination is a feast of inspired silliness.

As in most farces by Feydeau, who dominated French comic theater until World War I, every drop of panic and embarrassment is wrung out of situations fraught with mistaken identities and marital mischief. Raymonde Chandebise (Miriam Silverman) suspects that her husband has been dallying in the hotel Coq D'Or, notorious as a site for assignations. She cajoles her old convent school best friend Lucienne Homenides de Histangua (Justine Williams) to pen a perfumed letter to him, begging for a tryst, as a test. Unable to believe that he is handsome enough to attract such a proposition, Victor (Ben Steinfeld) assumes that the woman mistook him for his friend Romain Tournel (Michael Crane), who had been sitting in his box at the opera. He sends Tournel to the hotel, not knowing that the notorious womanizer has been campaigning to seduce his wife, who will also be showing up.

The doors start slamming big time by the second act, which takes place in the hotel of ill repute. Aptly, it opens with all the characters spilling out of the central door like clowns out of a VW, a cornucopia of merriment. Complicating matters is the presence of Lucienne's passionately jealous husband Carlos (Paco Tolson), who got hold of the letter and recognized his wife's handwriting. Thrown into this comic Cuisinart is drunken hall porter Poche, who looks like Victor. Of course, they end up in each other's clothes. And did I mention scheming butler Etienne (Darius Pierce) in drag, or the incoherent Prussian (Nick Rosenblum) who now and then pops his head down from the ceiling of the hotel bedroom?

You get the picture. Set design by John R. Lucas facilitates the tumult, and costume design by Phillip Contic lavishly decorates it. The three doors that face us at the opening rise to not only reveal the brothel but also to form a second floor of rooms. At other times, the second level is a platform for arbitrary antic activity. Sometimes this production is delightfully like trying to keep track of a Monty Python sketch while the Keystone Cops are cavorting in a corner with a parade of Fellini characters stampeding above them.

Director Golub couldn't go to more extremes to keep the energy up. Sometimes these frenetic Parisians while waiting their turn to speak are jerking around as though practicing tango lessons, so animated is this production. It must be heaps of fun for the actors, for they are constantly physicalizing their states of mind with Marx Brothers abandon. For example, at one point someone says "You're the doctor" to Dr. Finache and immediately gets a lollipop, whereupon the doc waggles his pocket watch like a hypnotist before the man to underscore his advice and collapses in a trance himself before immediately bouncing back up. All this while an otherwise normal conversation is going on. Loving visual puns, Golub directs like Groucho on amphetamines.

Between the direction and the jam-packed improvisations, A Flea In Her Ear is remarkably inventive. Steinfeld and the audience enjoy themselves as he breaks through the fourth wall, literally, and plays among them. Tolson is like Peter Sellers' Dr. Strangelove, wrestling with his revolver-wielding arm. Silverman and Williams as girlfriends Ramonde and Lucienne convey more giddy, hand-flapping fun than a season of sit-coms. (Although a consequence is that Lucienne's python-sized black boa threatens to leave feathers knee-high by intermission.) Taylor White as the speech-impaired Chandebise nephew drolly conveys more with his unintelligible lines, searching for the prosthetic palate he lost, than many actors can with entire monologues. White entertainingly ties together the theme of communication, or lack thereof, along with the vowels that zip overhead on a wire upon occasion ("Oh!" = "O," and so on).

Golub's tour de farce highpoint is a hilariously one-up on Woody Allen's hauling out Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall. When Bonnie Schiff-Glenn's character, the maid Antoinette, has been seen at the brothel and is sarcastically asked if perhaps that was merely her twin, she actually does produce her identically dressed twin sister Emily!

That, theater-lovers, is what you call going the extra mile.