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Friday, Sep 05, 2008
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Fun With Farce |
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| Fun With Farce | ||
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by Miryam Gordon - SGN A&E Writer Cloud 9 by Caryl Churchill directed by Mark Pinkosh Balagan Theatre through November 10, 2007 Farce is fiercely fun at Balagan Theatre, this production. Somehow, farce seems funnier in a British accent& Jolly old England wasn't very jolly for people living under the occupation of the British Empire. The British ideal of patriarchal supremacy and their disdain for anyone not British is skewered rather completely in Cloud 9, like the doll stuck with a knife in the first act. Churchill's play, written in the late 1970s, sets Act One in the waning years of the British Empire and Act Two in our present, but with the same characters established in Act One. So, time travel has its own rules, here. But she's not content with writing anything straight forward, so she specifies that men play women and women play men and a black native African is played by a white man. This morphing immediately makes the ensuing dialogue sound very different, when a man plays a dominated, submissive wife and a little boy is played by a woman. Act One has the most big laughs, with broad farce, performed sincerely but with a wink at the audience. It is very strange to have a white man talk about himself as a black man, but Chris McDonald does a spot-on accent and uses interesting physicality to portray the role. Ryan Higgins twirls and twitters so sweetly as Betty, the long-suffering wife, and Holly Fowers brings a strange, sexual twist to the son, Edward, who wants to "do what we did before" with the Harry the Adventurer who arrives for a visit, which is terribly creepy in a very funny way. In fact, almost everyone seems to have had a "moment" with Harry (Jake Groshong) at one time or another (even the servant), and he seems very flexible in his sexuality, ultimately misinterpreting the master-of-the-house Clive (Lee Morris), when Clive announces that there is no more important relationship than that of male friends. Samara Lerman gives a great dual role a workout in Act One as both Mrs. Saunders, the widowed vigorous neighbor who has sex with Clive, and Ellen, the meek nanny, who is actually in love with Betty. Then, there is the daughter, Victoria, who is a doll. Literally. A doll. Act Two is more difficult to think of as funny, since it's much less farcical when poking fun at today's mores. It's more than 100 years in the future, but for these characters, only 25 years has passed. So, the children have grown and the parents are now the grandparents. Now, women are ascendant over men and gayness is almost acceptable. Ryan Higgins now plays Betty's son, Edward, who has confronted and become comfortable with his gayness. Victoria is no longer a doll and is played by Samara Lerman. She begins a relationship with a single mother, strongly delineated by Holly Fowers, and Betty, now played by Juniper Berolzheimer, has to get used to the fact that both her son and daughter are in gay relationships. Part of the beauty of the play is trying to figure out what the writer means for us to understand. Perhaps it twists the ascendancy of the patriarchy into matriarchy. Sexual repression is now sexual acceptance. Certainly, it would be nice if the commonplace acceptance of homosexuality in the play were more widely experienced in our current culture. It's all something to think about. I think you might well like this jolly good production. For more information, go to www.balagantheatre.org or call 206-718-3245 or for tickets, go to www.brownpapertickets.com. Comments on reviews go to sgncritic@gmail.com. Betty Act 1: Featuring Ryan Higgins, photo by Chris Macdonald |
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