Old and New Comedies in Town Fit for Our Times

There’s comedy, and then there’s comedy. These days, there’s plenty of it to be had in Washington and not just in politics.

At the Shakespeare Theatre Company, there’s a rewardingly gut-busting or side-splitting double bill of short plays—“The Critics,” written by the playwright with the imposing name of Richard Brinsley Sheridan,  and “The Real Inspector Hound,” written by the brilliant playwright with a less imposing name of Tom Stoppard.  The plays are separated in time by 189 years—Sheridan’s play was written in 1779 (for Americans, three years after the writing and presentation to the world of the Declaration of Independence) and Stoppard’s play was written in 1968, a year of monumental events in the U.S. and the world, none of which are mentioned in the play.

At the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater, you can find the road company of “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love Murder,” a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical of a very particular kind which has pleasures of a different kind, from a different time and place.  The show is rooted in just about every cliché about Edwardian England and its aristocracy that you can think of, not to mention old whimsical and weird English film comedies of the 1940s and 1950s, most of them starring Alec Guinness.  This is not to say there is no audience for this: think “Downton Abbey: The Murder Mystery Musical.”

While there’s a definite British lineage, through history, time, authorship or setting to both projects, they are distinctly different in tone, look, feel and outlook.  However, it doesn’t follow that in order to like one, you have to be cool towards the other.  It depends a little on what you think is funny, whether you like yours originating in the belly or with a knowing smile.  Often, each show manages to provide both, actually.

Critics, of course, might have a special  affinity for a production of two short plays that are about them. More importantly, while “Gentleman” is certainly theatrical, with abundant imaginative stagecraft as much a part of its charm as talented actors, the Shakespeare Company double-bill is about, not just critics but the theater itself.  These two plays are as much about the spirit that fuels the old Mickey Rooney exclamation, “I know, let’s put on a show,” as it is about the hyper-egos of playwrights, actors, and yes, those fiends, the critics.

Sheridan—he wrote “School for Scandal” and “The Rivals”—is famous for giving his characters personality shorthand names, such as Mrs. Malaprop.  In “The Critic,” there are critics named Mr. Sneer, Mr. Dangle, and Mr. Puff, (much better, surely than Marks or Pressley or, dare I say it, Tischler) not to mention actresses named Mrs. Buxom, Signora Decollete and an actor named Sir Fretful Plagiary.

“The Critic” is a farce of the kind that the Shakespeare  Theatre Company has embraced with what can only be called all-out effort and energy,  under director Keith Baxter and in this production, STC Artistic Director Michael Kahn, who treats the material with full-bull bravado, a high-dudgeon approach to bewigged farce that is wonderfully shameless.  It centers, like its counterpart, around a play, in this case a rehearsal of a play about the Spanish Armada by no less a man than Mr. Puff,  played by Richard Stanton as a man who must have come out of the womb as hysteria personified, wearing a wig.  Two critics—Mr. Dangle and Mr. Sneer—promise to give him tips during a disastrous, side-splitting rehearsal, which might be viewed by Mr. Sheridan himself.  It says something for Sheridan that he is a character in the play, albeit an unseen one.

Mr. Puff is the play’s central conceit, and its heart and soul because while his peers Sneer and Dangle, played with masterful and pompous self-confidence, seem to at least give sneering lip service to art, Mr. Puff is a master of, well, puffery. “Did I see the play?” he asks, astounded.  “Good God, no.”

His attempts to actually direct a full cast represented by something less than a full stage and then stage the destruction of the Spanish Armada has to be seen to be laughed at (and with).  What fools these playwrights be.

Stoppard was and is no fool—“The Real Inspector Hound” features a performance of one of those old British manor murder mysteries like Agatha Christie’s still popular “The Mousetrap” looked over by two critics—one only a second stringer, fretting over his second-string status.  It’s interesting to note that both plays do the play-within-a-play bit, where the plays are particularly awful or seem to be.

Here the issue is where the life of the critics—Stanton again playing the nervous stringer and John Ahlin playing another wonderfully named critic named Birdboot—dissect with their profession.  Critics even today are an intrinsic, if not much beloved, part of the theater world, in it but not inside. While the play plays out on stage—the actors embracing their lot and parts with vigor and originality—the critics talk about their lives—the string wondering about his status, the married Birdboot wondering how to pursue one of the actresses on stage.  

Stoppard’s one of the smartest, wittiest and subtle playwright of modern times. Consider “The Real Thing,” “Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Jumpers” and my personal favorite, “Travesties.” He gives us laughs, lots of them, but he’s also, without beating you over the head with it, exploring what’s real, what’s not and how to make the reality on stage real and engaging.

“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” doesn’t reach that high (or low), but it delivers what it sets out to deliver—impeccable stagecraft, excellent performers, a whiz-bang first act in which an English nobody suddenly discovers that he is a member of an aristocratic  family with only eight people in front of him in line for the lordship.  Without too much thought, he hits upon a solution: Kill them all.

That’s the gist—plus a number of wonderful conceits—of the show: Will he do it, can he do it, how will he do it and can he keep both of the women he loves? The answer may or may not surprise you.

Here are some pluses: John Rapson, who plays all and sundry members of the tribe of d’Asquit with gleesome and seemingly impossible costume changes, and with distinct distinctiveness.  Kevin Massey, who has dash and charm and solid charisma as the upstart and murderous Monty Navarro.  Kristin Beth Williams as Sibella Hallward, the upwardly mobile blonde ambition type and Adrienne Eller as Phoebe, a much more demure cousin. Both ladies love and want Monty.

The mechanics of the deaths of the d’Asquit appeared to especially delight the opening night audiences.  For myself, in a farce I like some door slamming, which “Gentleman” delivers in an extended scene in which Monty tries to keep Sibella and Phoebe from encountering each other in the same apartment.  Too many instances of door-slamming to count, all of them funny.

The music and songs are pleasant and  are suited to the show and are staged and sung impeccably—but may not experience much of an afterlife without the show.

In these outrageous times, both productions are good for what might aid the ailing psyche, each in their own fashion.

The Shakespeare Theatre Company double bill is at the Lansburgh Theatre through Feb. 14. “Gentleman” is at the Eisenhower Theater through Jan. 30.