If you remember Mark Lamos’ lavish, frisky Hartford Stage productions of Moliere and Marivaux comedies in the 1980s and ’90s, you’re already primed for the immaculately dressed, deliriously well-spoken burst of chaos he’s got going in Westport.
Lamos has been the artistic director of Westport Country Playhouse for nearly a decade, but hasn’t directed classical comedies there with the same regularity as he did when he ran Hartford Stage.
His classy, old-school, upscale staging of “A Flea in Her Ear” is a welcome return to form. The doors slam impeccably. The characters question each other’s sanity, and their own, with antic grace and wit. There is a lot of crisp, snappy face-slapping and butt-kicking.
Lamos doesn’t go in for overkill. He measures out the gags. He doesn’t overlap the laughs. He doesn’t over-choreograph the action so that one door is slamming at the exact same moment another opens. For a farce, this production is positively leisurely — two and a half hours, including two intermissions. There’s a lot of physical comedy, but the actors have time to strike the funniest poses or arrange the craziest tableaux. You wouldn’t think that patience and control would make a farce funnier, but they do.
What truly elevates this production is its style. Costume designer Sara Jean Tosetti (who has a lot of operas and Shakespeare on her resume) provides a sumptuous turn-of-the-20th-century fashion show of glorious gowns and well-tailored vests. Her colorful, high-couture costumes seem both glamorous and goofy — the same way that the actors who wear them come off as both cultured and cuckoo.
Kristen Robinson’s scenic design (subtly lit with pastel overtones by lighting designer Matthew Richards) must find room for a revolving bed, plenty of places to sit and all those slamming doors, but she wisely keeps the walls clean and uncluttered. The effect is of a comic-strip panel, especially since Robinson has added a permanent brightly lit banner on the stage that reads “PARIS” but might as well say “Meanwhile, back in the bedroom…”
“Flea in Her Ear” is the best-known play by Georges Feydeau, who wrote some 60 comedies between 1882 and his death from syphilis in 1916. (Another of his works that’s regularly revived is “An Absolute Turkey,” which Connecticut Repertory Theatre staged in 2016.)
David Ives’ script adaptation, originally produced in Chicago in 2006 and gradually becoming the standard American script for this 1907 French farce, does what it can to be outrageous without being offensive or insulting. The Ives version is somewhat saucier than previous translations, but not vulgar. The seedy hotel known as “The Hotel Coq d’Or” in Feydeau’s original is now “The Frisky Puss.” Ives loves wordplay, vamping on various forms of the word “smitten” (“besmitten,” “smiting”) and crafting such amusing lines as “A foreign freak with cheek!” and “I really tackled that flunky, didn’t I?”
As with everything in this genre, there’s some egregious stereotyping, sexism and insensitivity. There is a character named Camille, for instance, who is hard to understand because he is unable to pronounce consonants. Some translations and productions have taken this an opportunity to laugh mercilessly at a disability. Here Ives treats it as sheer absurdity, like in that Monty Python sketch in which a Mr. Smoketoomuch can’t pronounce the letter “c” but easily says the same words when they’re spelled with a “k.” It helps at Westport that Mic Matarrese plays Camille loudly and forthrightly, not weak and withdrawn as you sometimes see with Camille.
Everyone, in fact, is loud and unapologetic. The cast works together marvelously, creating a world in which confusion reigns but all the preposterous plot twists are clearly understood. Most of the lead performers hail from the Delaware Resident Ensemble Players, where this co-production played in March. They’ve got the silliness down to a science.
The plot is barely worth describing, as it’s just a series of set-ups for comical confrontations. A prankish love note — thought up by one woman (the stylish Elizabeth Heflin as Raymonde) but actually written out by her friend (Antoinette Robinson as the earthier Lucienne), causes several different types of consternation among the men who see it.
One of them is Raymonde’s husband Victor (Lee E. Ernst), who bears an impossibly strong resemblance to a bellboy named Poche in the The Frisky Puss, where everybody ends up in various stages of undress in the second act. Lee E. Ernst plays Poche as well as Victor, of course, and his transformations from one character to another are expertly done. The whole cast hams it up grandly, especially Michael Gotch as the quick-tempered Don Carlos, who believes that his beloved Lucienne is holed up in the hotel.
The farce is heavily populated with jealous husbands, adulterous spouses, snooty upper-class folk protecting their reputations, and poorly educated, bottle-swilling servants who have no sense or manners. There are many ways that the jokes here could fall flat or cause offense, but they tend not to. Lamos has cast mature actors in all the roles, which means you never get into uncomfortable territory where a young person is being bullied or propositioned by an older, more powerful one. As a battle of the sexes, “A Flea in Her Ear” is pretty evenly matched. As a social satire, the upper classes get taken down a peg while the denizens of The Frisky Puss get points for honesty and openness. Yeah, there’s a skirt-chasing British bloke and a hotel owner who casually pummels his employees, but you don’t have to laugh at everything.
The comedy mainly comes from clueless, classless fools being laughably set in their ways, oblivious to how badly they’re behaving, and hurting only themselves through their ridiculous actions.
Lamos is flexing his farce muscle again, with fabulous results.
A FLEA IN HER EAR continues at Westport Country Playhouse through July 28. Performances are Tuesday at 7 p.m.; Wednesday at 2 and 8 p.m.; Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m.; and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $30 to $70. 203-227-4177 and westportplayhouse.org.
