A little 'Fourplay' misses chance at big delivery

Fourplay, a collection of four one-act plays directed by Jessica Brickman, TD '02, and produced by Max Ventilla, DC '02, like its theoretically clever name, is theoretically funny. It's clever, it's witty, and it throws around literary references faster than a pretentious English major trying to impress Harold Bloom. But for most of the first half of this short production, which includes three plays by David Ives from his collection, All in the Timing, its theoretical funniness remains unproven. The audience really wants to be laughing—it knows it should be laughing—but weak acting and overplayed lines, like a bad case of constipation, hold it all in. Bursting forth with a new cast of actors and a faster-paced script, Fourplay's theoretical humor finally comes to fruition in the final, hilarious play, The Actor's Nightmare, by Chris Durang.

KATHERINE ALDRICH/YH Aaron Crowell, SM '02, wonders what play he's in, and what outfit.

The first play, Ives' Sure Thing, fulfills the fantasy of any lovelorn male who thinks that if he just tries hard enough, he'll eventually get the girl. Like Groundhog Day, the 1993 flick that doomed Bill Murray to repeat the same day over and over again until he got it right, and Run Lola Run, the German movie that explored all the possibilities of a single event, Sure Thing plays rewind to the tune of a little bell as a bumbling Bill (Aaron Crowell, SM '02) tries to pick up pretty Betty (Rachel Grand, BR '02) at a cafe. Although Ives' constant comic onslaught—featuring lines like, "So what if I don't have a penis?"—can't help but produce a chuckle, Crowell's textbook repertoire of frustrated gesticulations and Grand's grating whine soon invoke an urge to hit the fast forward button and just get it over with already.

The Universal Language, another Ives play, creates a similar feeling of watch-glancing impatience. Featuring Marta Castaing, PC '02, as the timid "word processor" Dawn, looking for relief from a debilitating stutter, and Crowell as the nutty professor/con artist who ends up helping her despite his less-than-noble first intentions, Language suffers from a related syndrome of uninspired acting that frequently overrides Ives' often excessive cleverness. Sporting a green graduation robe and cap and prancing around the stage babbling in pseudo-English gibberish that he claims to be a new "universal language," Crowell somehow fails to achieve the comic timing required of farce, even as he dexterously delivers Ives' tongue-tying lines. Some of the difficulty comes from Ives himself, who crosses over the line of whimsy and becomes a little too clever for his own good.

Words, Words, Words is a play about three monkeys locked up to prove the theory that a bunch of monkeys typing on a typewriter can produce Hamlet if they keep at it long enough. Tom Woodrow, ES '00, Aaron Goldhamer, PC '00, and Crowell as the three test chimps Swift, Milton, and Kafka, all hop on top of set designers Chris Beardsley's, TD '02, and Forth Bagley's, CC '02, Picasso-esque chair sculptures, sniff their feet, eat bananas, and accidentally throw around scholarly literary allusions. Ives' wittiness, featuring monkey slips—such as "Paradise, wasn't it? Lost, lost, lost"—worthy of an A-paper in English 125, will please anyone who joys in picking out all the allusions buried in Tom Stoppard's Travesties and Shakespeare in Love. Especially convincing as a primate is Crowell, who, after stumbling as the lover in Sure Thing, seemed to find his calling courting his toes rather than his woman. Words still manages to drag at times, leaving the audience more interested in where props mistresses Miriam Stewart, TD '02, Katy Sharp, TC '02, and Maggie Whelan, PC '02, found three working, authentic typewriters.

Theater

Fourplay Directed by Jessica Brickman Stiles Little Theater Sat., Apr. 8, and Sun., Apr. 9, 9 p.m.

Yet no part of Fourplay delights both the pretentious intellectual and the scared little boy so much as the final play, The Actor's Nightmare. Returning for an encore that puts his previous performances to shame, Crowell blunders perfectly as George, an accountant who finds himself mysteriously mistaken for the understudy in the male lead of Noel Coward's Private Lives. Shoved into a love scene with the glamorous actress Sarah, played hilariously by Allysha Powanda, CC '03, and wearing only what appears to be a black scuba diving suit, George lives out every actor's worst nightmare—that he must improvise without knowing any lines or in what play he is performing. As new characters emerge and re-emerge, the mysterious play morphs with smooth and dizzying breathlessness into Hamlet, Samuel Beckett's Endgame, and finally, Robert Bolt's A Man for all Seasons, as George tries desperately to follow along. Grand, Emily Guilmette, TD '03, and Aaron Goldhamer, ES '03, fill out this vastly entertaining cast, and Powanda's final stint is nothing short of brilliant. The Actor's Nightmare leaves us relieved to have dreams about going to school in our underwear.

Fourplay is a combination of laughs and disappointments, a mixed bag supported by a cast and a series of scripts that alternate between hitting the audience directly on the funny bone and aiming just a little too high, leaving it with only a nagging headache.

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