The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Hilarious ‘Scapin’ finds play amid the playfulness
Ohio Shakespeare Festival’s artistic director makes most of his own adaptation
Molière’s 347-year-old commedia dell’arte-inspired farce, “Scapin the Schemer,” has been often translated and tailored to modern times and tastes.
One of its most notable adaptations is by professional clown and Oberlin College alum Bill Irwin and playwright Mark O’Donnell, whose acclaimed pratfallfilled production premiered at New York’s Roundabout Theatre Company in 1997.
One of its most recent adaptations is by Ohio Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director Terry Burgler, whose work is being performed by the Akron-based OSF under his ambidextrous direction.
Burgler keeps the piece period, playful and pruned to a manageable two acts and two hours. And it embraces all that is lightningfast and broadly physical in a 17th-century artform that offers highly predictable and recognizable stock characters — the hopeless lovers, the sad misanthrope, the elderly miser — engaged in highly comedic domestic conflicts in desperate need of outrageous resolution.
In “Scapin,” the privileged Octave and Leandre have pledged their young love to Hyacinth and Zerbinette, respectively, in their fathers’ absences.
But it all goes wrong when the fathers, Argante and Geronte, return with seemingly different marriage plans for their sons. The servant Scapin — who possesses a malicious wit and enjoys nothing more than spontaneous and often combustible scheming — comes to the young lovers’ aid by recruiting fellow servant Sylvester and skillfully playing the members of the households against one another.
In a play like this, it is all too easy to emphasize the storytelling — the slapstick clowning, the embellishment of running gags, the punching of punchlines — over the story beneath it all. Not here. Though wonderfully raucous and never missing an opportunity for a laugh — including the use of a corps of minor servants (Kelsey Tomlinson, Joe Pine, Sydney Keller) as peripheral sight gags — Burgler’s production never loses sight of or its grip on these characters’ passions and what they want most out of life.
This has everything to do with the energetic and athletic Ryan Zarecki as Scapin, who performs with one foot deeply planted in hilarity and the other in theatricality.
His portrayal places the title character well within the world of the play but also above it, delivering astute asides directly to members of the audience and offering us a wink and a nod when things are about to get interesting. In fact, the house lights are always on for such occasions. Zarecki is enchanting and engaging throughout the performance, and his mastery of all the fast-paced verbiage he is assigned is impressive.
His effectiveness is abetted by a wonderfully sadsack Benjamin Gregorio as Sylvester and seasoned performers Mark Stoffer and Geoffrey Darling as the foolish fathers, who are necessarily silly while maintaining a semblance of authenticity.
The same is true of the talented Jason Leupold and Derrick Winger as the young men, though Darling is able to do this while spending considerable time in a burlap sack.
And while the delightful Katie Zarecki is unable to make more of the gypsy Zerbinette than her perpetual laugh and gossipy ways, Sara Katrenich manages a bit of meta-theater as she occasionally breaks away from her constant crying to remind us, nonverbally, that this is a farce and that her character, Hyacinth, is more than what she seems on the surface.
Speaking of things we see on the surface, Kelsey Tomlinson’s costuming follows the commedia dell’arte tradition of dressing each character in line with its distinctive character type. She uses an eclectic and fairly unimaginative mix of modern and Elizabethan to get the job done.
The show is staged in front of the same all-purpose set — a two-tier house façade with multiple entrance and exit ways — that is used during every production of the OSF’s outdoor season at Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens.
But director Burgler manages to turn this albatross into a plaything by allowing Zarecki’s Scapin to find new and innovative ways to enter and exit the stage.
And he has created a production of Molière’s “Scapin” that generates laughter as a satisfying response rather than an automatic reflex.
... it embraces all that is lightning-fast and broadly physical in a 17th-century artform that offers highly predictable and recognizable stock characters ...