Boeing Boeing: Farce Unmoored

Christopher Innvar, Stephanie Jean Lane, and Mark H. Dold in Boeing Boeing. (Photo: Daniel Rader)

The irony of farce is that, though it’s supposed to be ridiculous, it can only work if it’s grounded in reality. There’s a delectable scene in the British stage hit The Play That Goes Wrong where a phone rings and one of the hapless amateurs stuck on stage in a fiasco of stunning proportions is expected to answer it. But the platform underneath him has come apart and he’s in danger of sliding off it onto the floor below and possibly breaking his neck. So the actor standing next to the phone, spurred by a desperate need to play out his string, rigs a series of increasingly nutty links between the jangling instrument and his stranded castmate. What makes the moment hilarious is the loopy logic of the two actors who are breaking their backs improvising a piece of compensatory staging, as if they could somehow save the show if only the poor bastard on the semi-collapsed platform could answer that phone. It’s the kind of logic that Buster Keaton was a genius at, where the performer meets a loose-screw issue with sober, one-step-at-a-time persistence.

I thought about The Play That Goes Wrong while I was watching Barrington Stage Company’s mounting of Boeing Boeing. The comedy, by the French playwright Marc Camoletti, was first produced in London in an English translation by Beverly Cross and Francis Evans in 1962, where it remained on the boards for seven years. (Jerry Lewis and Tony Curtis co-starred in a Hollywood movie adaptation in 1965.) Matthew Warchus revived it in the West End in 2007; the Broadway transfer, with a tip-top cast led by Mark Rylance and Bradley Whitford, was the funniest two and a half hours I’ve ever spent in a theatre. The play isn’t much more than a sketch for a series of farce routines. But it has a strong enough premise to support them: an architect living in Paris near Orly Airport conducts simultaneous affairs with three different flight attendants from different countries and different airlines, and he and his college buddy, who happens to be visiting him, find their mental resources stretched nearly to the breaking point when all three women show up on the same day. And, as in any bare-bones farce, the sharper the routines and the more skillful the actors the richer the entertainment.

The Barrington Stage production stars Christopher Innvar and Mark H. Dold as the two men juggling three women – an American (Gisela Chípe), an Italian (Stephanie Jean Lane) and a German (Kate MacCluggage) – and Debra Jo Rupp as the maid, whose face wears an unchanging expression of cynical exhaustion. The cast is full of old pros – about half of them are BSC Associate Artists, gathered together to celebrate the company’s thirtieth anniversary – and they all have their moments, especially the two leading men. MacCluggage has more than her share: every line lands and every physical choice seems like an inspiration. The scenic designer, Kristen Robinson, the costume designer, Sara Jean Tosetti, and the lighting designer, David Lander, have given the show a candied palette that feels just right for the period, which the program identifies as “the swingin’ 60’s.”

The problem is Julianne Boyd’s direction. For about half of the first act there’s enough clever stuff going on to keep you smiling, but it isn’t anchored by anything except the imperative to squeeze laughs out of the audience. You get the overall plot necessity for Bernard and his house guest Robert to keep the women from crossing paths, but the individual moments don’t have their own inner Rube Goldberg reasoning; they’re just shtick. In one second-act scene Berthe, the maid, comes into the living room while Robert and Bernard are tussling on the sofa and it looks like one of them is dry-humping the other. That’s an ancient trope, but I’ve seen it work half a dozen times in different shows and movies. Here, however, Boyd hasn’t come up with a specific enough reason for the two guys to be locked in what looks like a (clothed) coital embrace. It’s so generalized that if you laugh, it’s the promise of a knockout comic moment you’re laughing at, or perhaps the memory of other times you’ve seen the moment soar. As the show goes on – for nearly three hours – the costs have outrun the benefits. By the end of the evening, I felt as worn down as Debra Rupp looked.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies