Vacation turns into a comic disaster in Renaissance’s ‘L’Appartement’
Meg and Rooster imagined they would have a romantic getaway in Paris. Instead, they ended up with, to borrow a Rimbaud title, une saison en enfer.
Fortunately for us, their misery is our comic pleasure in “L’Appartement,” Renaissance Theaterworks’s new production of a Joanna Murray-Smith play. It opened Sunday evening.
Milwaukeeans have seen several plays by the prolific and protean Australian Murray-Smith, including the world premiere of “American Song” at Milwaukee Repertory Theater. The new Renaissance show, directed by Mallory Metoxen, is the first North American staging of “L’Appartement.”
Americans Meg (Emily Vitrano) and Rooster (Nick Narcisi) have leased a strikingly minimalist apartment in the ritzy 11th arrondissement from French hosts Serge (Jonathan Bangs) and Lea (Cara Johnston). Already frazzled from being parents of 3-year-old twins, one with special needs, Meg and Rooster are dazzled, intimidated and distressed by their impossibly cultured, attractive and accomplished hosts.
Early on, we think we have these Yanks pinned. He’s a loutish gym teacher in a Drink Wisconsinbly shirt, she’s an unfulfilled mother of young children. But their banter, fights, anguished confessions and even their sexy talk reveal much fuller characters. For example, Narcisi’s Rooster has an impassioned, killer speech about the all-consuming nature of parental love.
Fueled by terrible cheap wine (graciously pronounced “quaffable” by Rooster with a grimace), Vitrano’s Meg toggles between maudlin and aggressive moments while also unleashing the mayhem that will set up a final confrontation with their hosts. Vitrano’s total commitment to the physical comedy of a scene is the revelation for me in this production, and no less than Lucille Ball came to mind.
The physically minimalist “L’Appartement” has so few objects in it, and each is so important that I don’t want to name them and spoil a plot point. So let me allude to two moments that will make your evening a delight: Vitrano on the floor with a straw, and later Vitrano engaged in something that a visiting anthropologist, after blinking a few times, would surely dub a fertility ritual.
In its tearing down of couples’ facades, “L’Appartement” is a cousin of Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage,” though lighter and less savage — and with a lot less furniture.