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| 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.
