Variety Review-He Hunts
By Steven Oxman
Posted: Thurs., Apr. 18, 2002, 4:33pm PT
Director David Schweizer's work is now on display at two major area theaters,
with "He Hunts" at the Geffen and David Hare's "The Blue Room" at Pasadena
Playhouse through this weekend. Together, they provide a good sense of this
Los Angeles-based stage artist's highly stylized approach, and also a primer
on how his self-conscious theatricality can sometimes work and sometimes
not.
In "Blue Room," it doesn't work. But here, applied to a play that really
is a mechanical
entity, with characters one should never take too seriously, it does work,
even if the
production is genuinely funny only when the genuinely funny Carol Kane is
onstage.
"He Hunts" may not always be funny, but it's always fun to watch.
Before Kane's Madame Latour enters in the second scene, French farceur
Georges
Feydeau has already introduced his usual brand of comical plotting, familiar
to us
because pretty much every sitcom has employed it at one time or another
(whenever the cast of, say, "Frasier," ends up at a cabin in the woods, or
a hotel room
in a foreign city, and shenanigans based on secrets and misunderstandings
begin
-- think Feydeau).
For a long time now, bachelor Moricet (Stephen Nichols) has been attempting
to seduce
Leontine (Valarie Pettiford), wife of his best friend, Duchotel (Maxwell
Caulfield). Although
she enjoys the flirtation, Leontine won't go further, since she's convinced
her Duchotel is
completely faithful. She's naive, of course, to think that his frequent hunting
trips are really
that, because he's been bedding the wife of his supposed hunting buddy Cassecul
(V.J. Foster).
Details, though, aren't that important here. What is important is that they
all end up at the
same apartment house in the second scene, first trying to tryst, then trying
not to be found,
then trying to cover it all up. Kane plays the "concierge" of said house,
and she steals the
show. Dressed in a big poofy blue dress, able to make the audience giggle
just by wobbling
across the stage in mild tipsiness, Kane easily captures the absurdities
of this
once-respectable woman who gave it all up for a doomed affair with a lion
tamer.The other
performers can't really compare, but they don't need to -- their bland characters
wouldn't really
let them even if they emanated the same natural comic gifts. All of them
come off decently at
least, with the actors in smaller roles -- Cathy Lind Hayes as a dour servant
and Alan Mandell
as an opportunistic police commissioner -- making stronger impressions.
Schweizer has choreographed their antics so that everything is very shiny,
and the most
choreographed of all is Daniel Kucan as Duchotel's nephew, who also has a
sexual
engagement at Latour's building. Kucan moves as if he were a marionette,
in broad poses,
and his second-scene entrance is something quite close to a dance. Farce
involves controlled
chaos, and this production can be a bit heavy on the control and light on
the genuinely chaotic,
which once again means it's less humorous but still compelling.
For the record, the original French title of this work is "Monsieur Chasse!"
Phillip Littell
does a workmanlike job with translating Feydeau's French colloquialisms.
It's actually
among the toughest of translation challenges: Since the piece is set among
the ultra-modish
elite of late-19th century Paris, one wants idiomatic expressions that are
up-to-date and yet
sound classical.
Littell fills many scenes with clunkers like "Yessiree Bob" and "She's a
pip,"
but once in a while, he nails a line with graceful bawdiness, like Moricet's
aside to the audience,
"It's just like being a dentist: Never let the patient see the drill."The
design work is not just more
consistent, it's fabulous.
Chris Barreca (set), David Zinn (costumes) and Anne Militello (lighting)
are the true stars of this
show, their work amazingly detailed: the silver-padded proscenium, an
oh-so-burgundy interior,
the sheer curtain through which we view the scene changes and the light-beige,
drape-heavy
apartment for the middle portion of the play.Pettiford gets to wear two of
the most gorgeous stage
dresses ever, while Foster isn't so much clothed as blanketed in an over-the-top
plaid-on-plaid
ensemble. The pants that play a role in the paint-by-numbers plot are wonderfully
silly, and the
climax of the show arrives with Kane and a yacht-sized hat. Militello's lighting
ensures that all of
this is a very pretty picture indeed and, toward the end of scenes, reaches
for an otherworldly glow.
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