A Flea in Her Ear

'A Flea in Her Ear':

Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward's University, through Oct. 5

Running Time: 2 hrs., 50 min.

He staggers down the hallway, his legs wavering under him like willow branches straining to support the weight of a granite hippo. His face has the look of a sail that's just lost its last puff of wind -- completely slack, save for the frantic ripples above wide, desperate eyes. This is a guy at the end of an exceedingly frayed rope, and the thing that has caused the last strands to unravel, he tells us, is he's just seen himself asleep on a bed.

Ah, farce! It offers us the rare spectacle of a man whose life has utterly unwound -- for the most preposterous of reasons -- and seeing David Stokey carry that off in the Mary Moody Northen Theatre production of Georges Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear provides a refreshing reminder of how much pleasure that can give us. Watching his well-dressed, happily married, cheery Chandebise -- he's that "nicer guy" you keep hearing "it" couldn't have happened to -- devolve into a wobbling, slack-jawed shambles is a devilish delight.

Of course, the devil is in the details. For the chaos in farce to pay off, there must first be a highly organized world to break down. Director Ev Lunning Jr. takes pains to give us one, employing a trio of silent maids to literally set the house in order at the top of each act and moving his cast through it with a bearing and decorum that signals the premium they place on propriety -- even when engaged in debauchery, protocols must be observed. It's a clockwork world just waiting to bust its springs and go spiraling into lunacy.

The trick for the actors is to respond to this escalating nuttiness with larger-than-life reactions while retaining their humanity, and it's a trick that has tripped up many an experienced thespian, much less students making their first foray into the form. The old-hand guest artists here have little trouble. Dirk Van Allen simply relaxes into the play's broad comedy as if they were soft leather slippers, while Annie Suite, all but unrecognizable beneath mud-thick, gray eye shadow and lashes as thick as tarantula legs, treats the slapstick like a good goose in the rear, sparking her world-weary ex-courtesan with pop-eyed alarm.

The pleasant surprise is that for the most part, the student actors manage the trick as well. In a few places, characters flatten into caricatures as the performers push for comic results, but more common is comically satisfying work, such as that of Zach Muhn as the ladies' man smugly secure in his own suavity or of Julio Mella as the volcanic Spaniard erupting over his wife's supposed infidelity, his self-righteous, macho fury amusingly undercut by hith inability to pronounth the letter "eth."

But the show's center is Stokey as Chandebise and his vermouth-swilling doppelgänger, the hotel porter Poche. Stokey brings that Everyman quality and all-over decency that has served him well in so many other roles to keep his bourgeois businessman real as he finds himself in increasingly surreal situations: seeing his wife and business associate together in a tarty hotel; getting kicked in the backside by the hotel's drill-sergeant owner and forced to don a bellboy's uniform; and, yes, seeing himself (or at least someone who looks exactly like him) in his own bed. His sloshed Poche, on the other hand, clumps up and down stairs in size-15 loafers, limbs splayed; perpetually makes goofy faces; slurs his speech; barks. The performance is deliriously unrestrained, blowing hither and thither across the stage like a breeze, and yet it's never ungrounded; Stokey's Poche retains a simple disbelieving wonder that strikes a human chord. Stokey plays both roles so confidently and moves between them with such ease that you may find yourself, as I did, anticipating the moment when Chandebise and Poche finally appear onstage side by side.