Review: HOW THE OTHER HALF LOVES Plays for Laughs at Oyster Mill

Alan Ayckbourn is a phenomenon, a comic playwright who, in his native UK, is its Neil Simon - only more prolific and, some might argue, funnier. As the man who gave us THE NORMAN CONQUESTS and ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR, that's a plausible claim. However, he's been writing as long as Simon, Ayckbourn's first play premiering in England in 1959, and, well, he's very much like Neil Simon, as well, in the datedness of some of his plays. It doesn't mean they're not funny, but it takes more work to get there.

What it takes to make a play like HOW THE OTHER HALF LOVES, from 1971 (on Broadway) and with its inherent complications - like a few other farces, it's operating on a "split stage" principle in which you see two scenes with different characters occupying the same space at the same time - work is a cast who can handle the timing and who can take the dialogue past the creaks and squeaks in the joints of the plot. If that's not tricky, nothing is. Fortunately, at Oyster Mill Playhouse, Greg Merkel has assembled a cast that was, from the gate on opening night, able to handle the problems of farce timing and of making split-stage scenes work.

HOW THE OTHER HALF LOVES isn't really about two couples, but three - the wealthy boss and his wife and two of his employees and their wives; one of those two couples is verbally and all but physically abusive, and the other looks adorably perfect but is made of a control freak husband and a sweet but too docile wife who reshapes herself in his image and suffers for it. Part of the datedness is the clear-cut sexism, part is the assumption of busy men and bored housewives, and part is the easy acceptance of not merely dysfunctional but clearly abusive relationships among the couples. These issues are ever-present, but Merkel and the cast work past them.

Frank and Fiona Foster, the business owner and his wife, are played by Ron Nason and Kathleen Tacelosky with a fine sense of the absurd on both sides; Nason plays Frank as oblivious to everything that's not directly within his work goals, yet nosier than a gossip columnist, while Fiona is trying hard to exercise independence in a boring, overprivileged existence, to the point that she's forgotten their anniversary, and may have missed it due to a romantic fling that could have been with one of her husband's executives. Keith Bowerman and Gail Kemeny are Bob and Teresa Phillips, an executive with a drinking problem and his wife with a domestic problem - she's not domestic, and he needs her to be the perfect housewife and mother. Craig Copas and Kristen Borgersen Ottens play William and Mary Detwiler, the painstakingly thorough, brown-nosing, hyperintellectual employee and the wife he attempts to dominate to keep her molded in his image. The Phillips marriage is clearly volatile all the way through; Bowerman and Kemeny keep the marital misadventure moving quickly and almost frighteningly. Copas and Ottens show why 1960's housewives were so often prescribed "mother's little helpers" to keep them going, and the effort it takes to break free of husbandly micromanaging control of an overwhelming life.

In fact, in a farce full of fascinating moments, perhaps the two best begin with Ottens' playing Mary's moment, near the end of the play, of telling off William and asserting her refusal to be pushed around like a child any more. It's a moment the audience is more than willing to applaud. The other is earlier, and the prime example of the show's timing; the Fosters and the Phillips have invited the Detwilers to dinner on two different nights, and the scene shows the Detwilers at both dinner tables, in two different conversations, at the same time. It's a moment that only happens if there is no slip in the timing, and there is none here.

One other scene is, visually, the single funniest in the play. It's a sight gag starring Bowerman, but to reveal it here, in mere words, is to lose the joy of the moment. Nason, Bowerman, and Copas, all three husbands, are the stuff of which audience hysteria is made. Watch Copas stamping his feet in anger for another moment of pure laughter - he has a talent here that everyone simply does not have.

Dated? Yes. Irredeemable? Probably. Still ridiculously funny with the right cast? Yes, definitely. At Oyster Mill, the ridiculousness is there in full complement, with fine timing and some perfectly delightful gags that only work in the right hands. Merkel's pulled together the cast that could do it. If farces are your idea of a great time, this production is what you want. This is a cast that understands the idea of playing it for laughs, and throwing themselves into it to make it work. Kudos also to the costume design team, who made the couples so relentlessly early 1970's in look as well as in action.

At Oyster Mill through November 22. Tickets and information available at 717-737-6768 or from www.oystermill.com.

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