He Hunts -Geffen Playhouse
Reviewed by Travis Michael Holder for  www.ent-today.com

See, I have this enormous appreciation for David Schweizer, who once again I acknowledge as one of the very best directors working in Los Angeles today. And so several weeks ago, when I had to give a decidedly mixed review to his West Coast premiere of David Hare’s Blue Room, I was at least pleased to know that within a few weeks I would be able to turn things back around again with the review of He Hunts at the Geffen Playhouse.

How could He Hunts go wrong? Adapted freely by Phillip Littell, another of the most irreverently talented people working in theater today, from the outrageous and bawdy sex farce Monsieur Chasse! by Georges Feydeau, I expected an evening of instant redemption for Schweizer. Featuring a knockout ensemble cast, including some of my favorite actors — Stephen Nichols, Carol Kane, Alan Mandell, Valerie Pettiford, Cathy Lind Hayes and V.J. Foster — and produced under the supportive and always lavish auspices of the Geffen and Gil Cates, I arrived at the theater ready to be swept into the usual Schweizer Magic.

If there was any minor apprehension, it was knowing Megan Mullally, whom Schweizer had led so gloriously to multiple awards in the Evidence Room’s Berlin Circle last season, had pulled out of the show due to “scheduling conflicts” — read into that what you will — and that the male lead was being played by Maxwell Caulfield, an actor I have had little positive to write about at any time in the past. Ironically, Caulfield’s typically mannered work here is some of the best of the evening.

What went wrong? Sadly, almost everything I can think of leads back to David Schweizer. The set by Chris Barreca is ingenious and delightfully whimsical, the lighting design by Anne Militello and costumes by David Zinn couldn’t be more impressive, among many other exemplary production values. Littell’s adaptation is properly fanciful and could have been hilarious, but when a playwright, updating a 19th-century French farce without changing the time period or costuming, has his lead actress say lines such as, “Monsieur Duchotel has a lot of ‘splaining to do,” a director had better be ready to play along.

Schweizer stages with his usual finesse, especially in act two when the collision of mistaken identities, slamming doors, and underwear-clad men jumping through open windows is at a fever pitch. Still, the problem here is obvious: there is absolutely no consistency of style in the play’s performances. Everyone on this stage is doing his or her own little one-man show, utilizing whatever individual approach works best for him or her, robbing He Hunts of any ammunition to make the comedic kill it needs to succeed.

Caulfield and Nichols — who himself makes an majesticly game departure from drama here — work closest to the traditional just over-the-top foppish deportment of the genre, but the problem is most often they must play off Pettiford as the woman both men love. Though certainly good at what she does, Pettiford is basically doing another far more naturalistic play entirely and oddly, the frantically boner-popping smoldering sexuality which must exist between these three actors, whose uncontrollable passions lead the proceeding to its whose-pants-are-whose conclusion, is missing altogether.

As the too-wise maid, Hayes is a standout as the dour Cloris Leachman of Young Frankenstein, complete with exaggerated accent and eyes that roll at the drop of a double-entendre, while talented newcomer to L.A. theater Daniel Kucan, as hormone-heavy ne’er-do-well nephew Gontreins, is asked to shake the period-defying shaggy blond surfer mop flopping in his face, teeter around physically as though riding an invisible board, and emulate Keanu Reeves in one of his earliest Excellent Adventures. Complete with Foster offering a direct reprise of his ill-bred, ballooning-stomached ragtag buffoon from the Schweizer-led Broadway several years ago at the Actors Gang, the result is Stereotypes R Us. If such rampant cliches were consistent, more a contribution than a distraction to the proceedings, these fine veteran actors would have accomplished their tasks splendidly. Most impressive and less out of place are Mandell as a lecherous tit-grabbing police constable and Kane as the tippling former countess reduced to running the boys’ weekend pleasure palace, keeping the busy keys seductively housed in her voluptuous bosom. But no matter how skilled any of these well meant performances are, none seem connected to the same play, a fault that can only land squarely on the director’s shoulders.

This presentation was obviously fraught with problems along the way. Maybe Schweizer shouldn’t have committed to two such demanding pieces simultaneously, opening both The Blue Room and He Hunts within several weeks of each other at two of L.A.’s most prominent theaters. Neither in any way properly showcases the signature brilliance that guided and energized such memorable past productions as Salome and Broadway at the Actors Gang, The Waiting Room at the Taper, Kingfish, Demon Wine or The Illusion at the old lost and lamented LATC, or Berlin Circle and Tony Abatemarco’s ingenious one-man marvel Cologne, or The Ways Evil Enters the World at the Evidence Room. David Schweizer is still the best, but this time out gets my Jules Aaron Award for 2002, spreading himself so thin that his current work has lost all its flavor.

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He Hunts (index of reviews/play info)

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