American Players Theatre’s farcical ‘Flea’ asks about what we really see
Reviewing an early Georges Feydeau comedy, a droll critic predicted that this master farceur would go mad and end his days in an asylum.
That’s exactly what happened, which suggests there might be more going on than all the laughs you’ll enjoy in watching American Players Theatre’s exquisitely executed and ferociously funny production of Feydeau’s “A Flea in Her Ear.” It’s now on stage under David Frank’s direction, in the company’s outdoor amphitheater in Spring Green.
Feydeau’s plays don’t get done much in America: they’re too hard, require too much rehearsal time and demand extraordinarily gifted actors who, ideally, work in repertory and therefore know and trust one another. Voilà APT, which features such actors as well as a newly revamped stage, able to accommodate the nearly 300 entrances and exits in this complicated play.
Feydeau’s plot is in fact too complicated — and, on paper, much too boring — to bother summarizing here. Suffice it to say that it involves two fundamental building blocks in classic farce.
In the first, a jealous spouse (Kelsey Brennan) who suspects her husband of cheating hatches a plot in which her friend (APT newcomer Andrea San Miguel) serves as decoy. The plan: Entrap him in a hotel with the awesome name of Mount Venus that includes a revolving bed (something APT couldn’t have credibly pulled off on its old stage).
The second involves a case of mistaken identity: The hubby and the hotel porter look exactly alike. No surprise there, since both characters are played by David Daniel.
As the hubby, Daniel is a genial but proper insurance company executive in a play where one can’t actually begin to assess, quantify or control the future. Newly experiencing performance problems in the boudoir, this formerly confident man is learning what every middleaged person must: One isn’t nearly as in control of one’s body or self as formerly presumed.
As the porter, Daniel is a drunk who gets kicked around — literally — by the proprietor (John Pribyl), a onetime military man running the hotel with his wife (Tracy Michelle Arnold). This martinet has control issues of his own — all the more inane when one considers that he’s running the sort of seedy joint where mayhem rules and rentals are by the hour.
Nobody is in control in “Flea”; efforts to assert order continually misfire — true to a cosmically indifferent universe reminding us every day that we can’t control our destiny.
Efforts to communicate get lost in translation: A randy German guest (Jonathan Smoots) and a man with a speech defect (a show-stealing Nate Burger) are continually misunderstood, while a couple speaking in Spanish (a hot-tempered, pistol-wielding Juan Rivera Lebron and San Miguel) aren’t understood at all.
One can’t trust what one sees: An insouciant rake (a delightful Marcus Truschinski) is continually punched in the nose because he confuses Daniel’s two characters, while a maid (Cristina Panfilio) caught in the act by her hubby (John Taylor Phillips) insists he didn’t see what he — and we — clearly saw.
Or did we? By the end of this frenetic three-hour journey into the night, one is tempted to join the many onstage characters wondering aloud if they’re going mad.
What had initially resembled a measured drawing room comedy — an illusion reinforced by a characteristically detailed and realistic Jack Magaw scenic design — devolves into a nightmare that includes terrified screams, hurtling bodies and random violence.
Sure, there’s a return to order by play’s end, but can one ever really return to normalcy after undressing so much of one’s self and one’s fears? You’ll have a splendidly good time watching this wellacted “Flea.” But as you traipse toward your car afterward, you might catch yourself wondering how much you really know of yourself and those others going downhill with you.