theater

Berkeley Rep stages an Anglo-Italian farce

Critic injured by laughs at Berkeley Rep1431974925OM9_lr-1.jpg

Is it possible to get a hernia from laughing too hard in a theater seat?  It must be.  How else explain the delicious pain I feel the morning after One Man, Two Guvnors nearly disabled my funnybone at Berkeley Rep?

I used to think the Bill Irwin/David Shiner escapade, Fool Moon, was the funniest show I’d seen in the Bay Area, but One Man,Two Guvnors matches and maybe even surpasses it.  It’s a brilliant comedy.

And it’s a farce.  That surprises me, because i’m not a fan of farce, which too often tries too hard.  Not that this one doesn’t try its damnedest, but it does so with such assured, over-the-top silliness that I couldn’t resist.

It also has great credentials.  It’s based on Carlo Goldoni’s 1743 A Servant of Two Masters, which some cite as the greatest commedia dell’arte creation of them all, surpassing even Moliere.  This version is Richard Bean’s National Theatre of England update of the classic, which became a big hit on Broadway, too.  And it’s directed by the ingenious David Ivers, who assembled a bright and brash revival of the Marx Brothers’ hit, The Coconuts, for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival last season.

Ivers really knows how to fill a tent with a wild and crazy show.

Playwright Bean moves his take on Goldoni’s classic from 18th century Italy to the English seaside resort of Brighton in 1963, when the Beatles had not yet supplanted the lively pop musical variant called skiffle, played energetically at the Rep production by Casey Hurt, Mike McGraw, Marcus Högsta, and Andrew Niven.  The plot, which flies onstage like some dismembered thing reassembling itself, begins at an engagement party that, not surprisingly, flops big time.  The bride’s former boyfriend, who has been murdered, unexpectedly breezes in along with his servant.  What’s going on?  When we learn the dead guy had an (almost) identical twin sister, we can’t help suspecting the sister of trying something on disguised as her deceased bro, but what?

Twins are often the stuff of comedy (think Twelfth Night), and this pair are only the beginning of this one.  The servant, Francis Henshaw, is a twitchy mash up of ingenuity and ineptitude, and on the streets of Brighton in front of a pub he fumblingly accumulates a second master, who turns out to have an unexpected link to the first one.  He thinks the dual employment a smashing idea–two salaries!–but not so fast.  He has to scramble to keep his two guvnors from discovering one another, and the play takes off as he does his frantic best to make his plan work.  Along the way there are postal mix-ups, attempted seductions, angry knife-play, song-and-dance, and a frantic search for the next meal.

As well as great credentials One Man, Two Guvnors has a great star: Dan Donoghue.  The guy is an astonishing physical comedian, with expert verbal timing to match.  His five-minute bit, as he attempts simply to move a steamer trunk a few feet, had me helpless with laughter.  It alone is worth the price of admission.  Among a gamely capable cast–William Connell, Brad Culver, John-David Keller, Gerry McIntyre, Sarah Moser, Helen Sadler, Robert Sicular, and Claire Warden–i especially enjoyed spending time with Bay Area treasures, Ron Campbell and Danny Scheie, who make you appreciate living where you can experience their nutty ingenuity live onstage.

The production is enhanced by its creative team: Hugh Landwehr (sets), Meg Neville (costumes), Alexander V. Nichols (lighting) and Lindsay Jones (sound).

One Man, Two Guvnors plays on the Roda stage until June 21st.  Anna Deveare Smith makes a special appearance, in Doing Time in Education, in July.  The Rep’s 2015-16 season begins in October with The Hypocrites’ Pirates of Penzance.  For tickets/information call 647-2949 or visit www.berkeleyrep.org. 

–ROBERT HALL