Brother, could you spare a big fat Italian guy?

JOHN YI/YH Stacie Lents, SY '00, Boomie Aglietti, DC '00, and Steve Holt, GRD '04, discuss contracts for tenor-lending.

Every once in a while, a play comes along that makes you question the nature of existence and teaches you what it means to love. Lend Me a Tenor, the Dramat's first Experimental production of the year, is not that play. It's a crowd-pleasing farce with enough gratuitous breast-grabbing to make it pleasingly post-modern.

As with most farces, Tenor starts with something that doesn't happen: Tito Morelli (Cary Clarke, ES '02), the world-famous Italian tenore, is set to do a one-night engagement of Verdi's Otello in Cleveland. But he hasn't arrived yet, and when he gets there, he's too sick to sing.

Luckily, Tito's got all the screwball figures from Farce 101 at his hotel to help: Max (Boomie Aglietti, DC '00) who wants to be a star tenor himself, but who doesn't yet have the nerve; Maggie (Stacie Lents, SY '00), his frisky fiancée who doesn't yet realize she's in love with him; and Saunders (Steve Holt, GRD '04), the apoplectic, sharp-tongued theater manager who doesn't yet realize that the Max he's got may be just as good as the Tito he's expecting. Tito has a wife, Maria (Ginny Smith, TC '02), who looks like she just walked off one of those Contadina tomato sauce labels. And, of course, Tito has lots of partners with whom to philander: the older, Gloria Swansonesque diva, Julia (Amy Justman, SM '00), and Diana (Lyric Benson, PC '02), the young, negligée-clad vamp. Add a star-struck bellhop (Bradley Bazzle, CC '02), stir, and you get instant farce.

The script does a good job of setting up obstacles and then knocking them down. Tito accidentally takes too much phenobarbitol, Max finds him and thinks he's dead, and Saunders convinces him to go on as Otello in his place. The real Tito wakes up and runs to the theater. Everyone tries, alternately, to have sex with or kill the wrong person. Lots of doors get slammed (seven by my count), and there are ceaseless histrionics.

Essentially, writer Ken Ludwig set out to construct the archetypal über-farce, and succeeded in creating a show that evokes nostalgia for the "good ol' days" of theater without actually generating any originality. The opera theme is interesting, and the production achieves its most poignant and funny moments when it examines the business end of stagecraft. Most of the time, though, Ludwig has a checklist of dramatic elements and stock types that need to make an appearance before the curtain can fall. The first two acts are models of comic set-up and anticipation. But the final two acts conclude with such elbow-nudging predictability and sitcom moralizing that the exercise hardly seems worth the effort. Of course she's in the closet; of course that's the wrong Tito; of course the Italian woman is named Maria and has a fiery temper. You get the idea.

Ludwig is known for this kind of thing. His chameleonic disappearance behind safe, old formulas evinces lots of warm feelings for the way matinee drama used to be before all these crazy modernist kids with their berets took over the stage, but it's neither challenging nor interesting as theater.

The greatest shame of all may be that a cast this prodigiously gifted can't be more challenged by the material. Lents has a palpable romanticism as Maggie; Aglietti's Max is a marvel of comic timing and raw energy. Clarke's Tito and Smith's Maria transcend their stereotypes to achieve a truly believable relationship. Benson's Diana and Just-man's Julia might have been interchangeable competitors who merely take different approaches to mastering Tito's affections. Instead, they both dominate their parts to craft the most memorable, and consistently funny, roles in the show. Holt's Saunders is an apoplectic madman with a stilted walk and a pronounced facial tic who could get laughs just by standing in place. The only sour note may be Bazzle's bellhop, who can't seem to muster the same manic energy as the rest of the cast.

Director Alex Timbers, ES '01, uses the whole stage to great effect and crafts a remarkably fluid production whose wonderful comic timing is encapsulated in a two-minute "abridged version" of the story that ends the play. In the end, though, I disagree with his reasoning in choosing Tenor. His director's note anticipates criticism that the play is irrelevant by delighting in its irrelevancy, fostering a kind of militant playfulness. For example, on the idea that the good must be beautiful, he writes, "The beautiful need not breed exclusively. The ugly need not be treated as lepers, flipper babies, or dwarves."

Point taken. But farce also need not be proudly formulaic in order to be funny. Comedy, in whatever form it takes, is a vibrant part of the Yale theater scene. Farce, as proven by past Dramat shows like Don't Dress for Dinner, certainly applies. Yet, Experimental shows must do more than exploit a form for its own sake. The Dramat needs to prove its relevancy continually, despite its years of history and considerable resources. Otherwise, the talented cast and crew of shows like Lend Me a Tenor may have to look to independent Yale drama for challenges equal to their potential.

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