Family fun RWU’s sprightly Garden BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Like a good book you want to snuggle up with all summer, Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests is a triptych of plays that’s fun to spend time with again and again. The Barn Summer Playhouse at Roger Williams University is staging the last in the series, Round and Round the Garden, and doing a good job of work.

Over the past four years, the university theater has staged the other two plays, but this is not only the best — and funniest — of the lot by the British playwright, it’s by far the best accomplished one by the Bristol company. All the action happens in the same family house on the same extended weekend, with the same characters. The first of the plays, Table Manners, takes place in the dining room, Living Together takes place in the living room, and all of this one happens in the garden out back. An exit in one play is usually an entrance into another. When these were originally produced in the West End, theatergoers could see the plays in a three-night sequence, allowing them to recall incidents from the other plays that happened off-stage in the one they were now watching. The experience must have been not unlike inhabiting the mind of God — or, better yet, of the playwright.

The Norman at the center of the plays is an amiable, overgrown adolescent-at-heart (and loins), well played here with casual charm by Andrew Casey. Actors can do dreadful things with Norman, and I’ve seen portrayals that wouldn’t be seductive in a women’s prison. The easiest way is to make him a puppy who gets away with chewing slippers by being amusingly adorable. Casey makes him more knowing than that, like a precocious schoolboy who survives his mischief by turning it into a joke.

The butt of his latest joke/dalliance is Annie (Elise Arsenault). The weekend is set at her home, where she takes care of a demanding invalid mother (one duty: reading torrid sex novels to her) whom we never see in any of the plays. Her brother Reg (Matthew James) and his wife Sarah (Michelle G. Donovan) have come to take over the nursing while Annie busses off for a quiet weekend alone, or so she says. She’s actually supposed to be rendezvousing with Norman behind the village post office in an hour, to tear off on a "really dirty weekend," as she enthusiastically puts it.

But ever-adolescent Norman, a bored assistant librarian up on his luck, can’t wait. Delayed gratification is torture for him, so he shows up with fancy pajamas sticking out of his briefcase, and it doesn’t take long for the secret to be out. One of the last to know is Tom (Timothy Kowalewski), a mild-mannered veterinarian who has been hanging around Annie for three years with nary a sexual overture forthcoming.

By scene two, Norman has been dragged out to the garden from the other plays, where he has gotten drunk and everyone else has gotten a good idea of his hound dog plans — even his wife, Ruth (Katie van der Sleesen). She has been onto his philandering ways for years and regards his escapades as she might outbursts from a mad relative across the tea trolley, dolefully, before turning back to her oolong. My favorite line in the play perfects the Norman-the-dog motif, as she instructs one target of his affections: "If you don’t want him licking your face, then don’t offer him little tidbits."

Arsenault’s Annie is spirited enough for us to not feel too sorry for her, which would reduce her to the role of sex-starved spinster. Besides the will she?/won’t she? tension about resuming the tryst with Norman, we get nicely pulled into Annie’s dilemma over Tom. Will she settle for his lack of commitment, not to mention lack of libido, or boot him into action? For his part, Kowalewski is effectively, brutally, dim as Tom. The funniest scene in this production is when Ruth is trying to get Tom to show a spark of vitality and he takes her metaphorical examples — rolling around the grass naked, tearing off his clothes, is one of her images — for actually lusting after him.

Director William Grandgeorge keeps things moving along briskly and has made sure that accents don’t slip off and distract us. Set design by Crystal Haskett is colorful and functional, with plenty of places for Norman to get snagged in brambles, as he keeps complaining about. Between Ayckbourn and The Barn Summer Playhouse, an entertaining evening is ready for us.