Jun 28, 2008

'Wedding' a tour de farce

By John Angell Grant / Theater Reviewer

It's the morning of your wedding day. You wake up in bed with a hangover next to a beautiful naked woman you don't recognize. What do you do now?

That's what perplexed bridegroom Bill tries to figure out over the ensuing two hours in playwright Robin Hawdon's raucous British sex farce "Perfect Wedding." This fast-paced and amusing show is running at Lucie Stern Community Theatre presented by Palo Alto Players.

"Perfect Wedding" takes as its model the classic French sex farce. The play contains a boatload of comic mistaken identity, and many sudden entrances and exits through four doors leading in and out of the honeymoon suite of a gracious period country-home hotel outside London.

Initially, philandering bridegroom Bill (stuffy Briton Graham Hill) and his one-nighter mystery female (the beautiful Linnea George) pass through a crisis negotiation phase. Sitting in bed next to each other, they consider such options as, "I won't tell if you don't."

Suddenly wedding guests arrive, the bride is knocking at the door, and the mystery woman finds herself barricaded in the bathroom. Bill recruits his best man (a put-upon Lance Fuller) to help in the cover-up. Lie upon lie ensues, building a massive house of dishonest cards.

Is it possible, the co-conspirators wonder, to get divorced before you actually get married? Will the imminent wedding go down in flames?

What makes "Perfect Wedding" work is that, behind all the entrance and exit sex farce hullabaloo, the story anchors itself in serious and meaningful themes. What is love, it asks. Is there a difference between reality and one's dream world? These are conundrums that seriously disturb the characters in the play.

Director Jeanie Forte has staged a very able community theater production, featuring a generous dollop of sexy leg and derriere. The actors handle their British accents well, create credible characters and keep the action moving.

Jeannie Naughton stands out as a wacky hotel chambermaid, recruited blindly into the mischievous cover-up. To comic effect, not all of this chambermaid's strained mental synapses are firing in proper sequence, creating a wonderfully cockeyed performance as a lower status person who has more of the skulduggery figured out than her arrogant higher status counterparts.

At times "Perfect Wedding" feels like a fast-paced two-hour version of that old vaudeville routine, "Who's on first?" There are multiple layers of double-entendre embedded in the dialogue's subtext.

The show is very British, in the sense that the people in love have trouble communicating directly about their feelings. Rather, they find themselves expressing their own feelings, and learning about the feeling of others through third parties.

When the dust settles, "Perfect Wedding" turns out to be alternately a spoof about the sacrilege and sacrament of marriage.

To be a crowd-pleasing farce requires a happy ending. The play delivers that, but I bet you can't guess what it is.

This is a good show for the summer. Just remember, don't let that skimpy pink bra hanging off the back of your hotel room chair give you away.

Rating: Three stars


E-mail John Angell Grant at jagplays@yahoo.com.