THE EXPLORERS CLUB
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THE COMEDY OR ERRORS
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Part screwball comedy, part
farce, part comedy-of-manners, part satire The Explorers Club by Nell Benjamin is also part-derivative and part-original. Its
derivative aspects are the ones that maaayyyy incur anything from
a mild reluctance (which I felt) to a stony resistance (some other notices, or
so I’m told), simply because the sophisticated, comedy-savvy viewer can only
sigh at tropes like the young, callow hero in love with the plucky girl to whom
he’s too shy to make an advance—which you’l find here in the person of
earnest Professor Cope (Brian Avers)
and daring female explorer Phyllida Spotte-Hume (Jennifer Westfeldt). But once those things are established and you
allow yourself to hop past them—assuming you can, and I think you
should—Ms. Benjamin’s send-up of male enclaves, in this case an Explorers
Club set in 1879 London, is an agreeably bouncy ride and as cute as a bunny
(despite all the more ferocious stuffed animal heads adorning the walls). She
manages to comment on male chauvinism without making the play a feminist tract,
to lampoon both primitive notions of science as well as, er, primitives without
losing affection for her characters, and the silliness rituals of manly-male
bonding without likewise asserting that male bonding itself is silly.
And
though she doesn’t add too much fresh to the young-potential-lovers characters,
she manages delightful spins on all the others—most particularly a deist
(John McMartin) whose basic stance is
that “God invented science and God wrote the Bible,” all his logic deriving
therefrom; and a chest-thumping expeditioner (David Furr, who enters wearing one) who ought to be as famous
for how many cohorts he loses along the way as the expeditions on which they
joined him. Oh, and a native (Carson Elrod), who is both very blue (I don’t mean sad) and weirdly adaptive. Add
to this an increasingly dexterous bit o comedy business that escalates, each
time it is rendered, to include more and more of the cast, and you have…well,
what, really. Nothing much except an entertainment that’s absolutely perfect
for the Summer season and, come to think of it, for the family too, if the kids
can keep up with a certain level of verbal fencing.
Basically,
The Explorer’s Club delivers very assured
comedy writing, supported by expert comedy acting (others are Max Baker,
Steven Boyer, Arnie Burton and Lorenzo Pisoni) and comedy direction (Marc Bruni) that balances Swiss-watch physical timing with
unforced, easy-lob verbal delivery. It seems churlish to nitpick in the face of
all that.
Director Daniel Sullivan’s Shakespeare in the (Public Theater)
Park rendition of The Comedy
of Errors is a go at
putting the Bard through a screwball filter. Not that the plays plot needs help
in being a basically silly confection; but comedy storytelling moved slower in
Shakespeare’s day, and in this switchemup about two partnered sets of separated
twins (both played expertly by Hamish Linklater and Jesse Tyler Ferguson), the original, unabridged text takes time to
methodically dramatize every step of the comic complication. Whereas this
version, set in a kind of flapper-era, Chicago-like Ephesus, complete with
gangster and local accents, takes its cue from screenwriting technique;
starting as late into each comic complication as possible that will allow the
audience to intuit all that came before—reducing it all to 90 minutes, no
‘mish. It’s a bold move, and it sometimes teeters on the brink of
too-fast-to-understand, since the text doesn’t always cooperate cleanly, but
for the most part a balance is maintained, even if the results are a bit Comedy
of Errors Lite. (It’s impossible to know how much credited dramaturg
Robert Blacker had to do with the
cutting and reshaping, but since it’s the kind of thing a Shakespearean
dramaturg ought to be on hand for, let’s flag his participation.)
The
cast is game and able, the gimmick of the setting is agreeable and if it isn’t
always comedy gold, it’s comedy-good-enough for a romp beneath the stars.
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