Exhibitionism

Run for Your Wife

Running Time: 1 hr, 50 min

Describing a farce is like kissing your sister, unless your sister is Marilyn Monroe or Raquel Welch or Elle Macpherson, in which case you might enjoy the latter. Well, maybe that’s going a bit far, but I think you get the point. While it’s often played in a very broad, exaggerated fashion, farce is really like a far-out joke that’s actually not that far from reality. In this Onstage Theatre Company production, you get a bit of that broad style of play, but what you get mostly is engaging performances, split-second timing, and a lot of laughs.

The laughs come from a script by Ray Cooney that’s more than 20 years old but somehow manages to remain topical, probably because it deals in stereotypes that will never go out of style: the bumbling husband, his well-meaning sidekick, the suspicious police inspector, and (hold onto your political correctness here) the raging queen. There really is no other way to describe Richard Craig’s performance as upstairs neighbor Bobby Franklyn, who struts and flits his time upon the stage like a refugee from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

Craig could have gone even further than he did, but he, like most of the actors here, cleaves closer to reality than unreality. That’s a good thing considering the plot, in which a taxi driver named John Smith tries to juggle two wives after accidentally getting concussed with a handbag (don’t ask) and giving out the wrong address while at the hospital, thus bringing the police into the picture, and ending up with one wife when he’s supposed to be with the other – well, I’m going to stop there. It gets complicated, as farces tend to do, and the story ends up involving, among others, the taxi driver, his friend, the two wives, two police inspectors, a photographer, the gay neighbor, another John Smith, a farmer, a nonexistent son, a nun, a maid, and a transvestite named Lofty. All this despite the fact that there are only seven actors, only one of whom plays a double role. Mistaken identity plays a more than large part in the plot.

But make no mistake about this: Director Michael Hankin stages a very entertaining production. While some timing and tempo problems are evident in the first act, Hankin always keeps the action moving briskly, having the actors play simultaneous scenes in the same stage space, which is always fun and interesting to watch. Despite a second act that is little more than 50 minutes of jokes about gays and transvestites, Hankin gets very human performances from his actors, especially Brian Jepson, who plays the sidekick, and Beau Paul, who could have turned John Smith into a flailing mass of twitching nerves, but who instead just delivers his lines with sense and, when he’s not running on and off the stage, paces occasionally. So if you’re looking for a laugh and think you can get past some inconsistent English dialect work, take it from a guy who was dead tired when he went to see this and laughed himself silly: There are many laughs to be had right here.

This article appears in February 6 • 2004.