BWW Reviews: BEDROOM FARCE Leaves Audiences in Stitches as Westport Country Playhouse's Grown-Up Bedtime Tale

The idea that you can tell a lot about a person (or a couple) by their bedroom surfaces early on in Alan Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce. But this is hardly the wink wink, elbow in the ribs easy joke kind of stuff. (Thank God.)

Bedrooms are where one (ideally) begins and ends each day and prepares their image and attitude each time they cross over into the public outside world. While Bedroom Farce is certainly a comedy, Ayckbourn captures the seriousness in this fact. "People had said to me that I'd set plays everywhere but in the bedroom," Ayckbourn said after writing Bedroom Farce in 1975. "I became fascinated by what people do in bedrooms."

Be glad a playwright as prolific as Ayckbourn rose to the challenge. With 81 plays under his belt (he averages one play every seven months), he celebrates his 60th year as a man of the theater in 2015. Appropriately enough, Sir Ayckbourn wrote this particular work with a strict deadline and a few sleepless nights; set to rehearse on a Monday, he began writing the previous Wednesday. Perhaps as a result, Bedroom Farce captures all the fun, frustration, fighting, frivolity, and fidgeting that inevitably goes into any all-nighter.

The warm set, putting on of jimjams, and constant talk of how late the night is gets the audience feeling snuggly; it's a grown-ups' perfect bedtime tale. However, John Tillinger's uproarious ensemble keeps them from nodding off.

The play focuses in three bedrooms and on four couples, all in various states of a relationship. There's Kate and Malcolm, wonderfully paired and played by Claire Karpen and Scott Drummond, both of whom are making welcome debuts at the Playhouse this summer. The two are in the perfectly imperfect beginnings of a serious relationship; with the half-finished wallpaper up in the bedroom, incomplete furniture, and a housewarming party that goes awry, it's easy to miss that these days are the best part, their relationship, arguably the most loving.

There's Delia and Ernest (Cecilia Hart and Paxton Whitehead) who are in the late companionship stage of their affection; eating sardines on toast in bed is about as wild as these cats get. Similarly, Hart and Whitehead's characters nab some of the best jokes in the script; however, there's king-sized potential for the actors to take them further.

Jan and Nick are in the thick of marriage, unapologetically pointing out each other's flaws (no matter how painful) and yet resolute in their commitment to one another. Bed-ridden with a bad back injury, Matthew Greer's Nick gets laughs without moving a muscle (often literally). Nicole Lowrance's character Jan stands tall in her own two pumps, unafraid to say (and do) as she pleases; Lowrance tackles the role with delightful spunk.

And of course, there's troubled Trevor and Susannah; their bedroom is never seen, further highlighting the sad disconnect in their relationship. As is (unfortunately) typical with any feuding couple, they drag all of the other characters into the mix, making 4 a.m. phone calls, starting fights, and ending up in beds they shouldn't.

Last year, Sarah Manton played Matthew Greer's character's sickeningly sweet fiancée in Ayckbourn's other gut buster, Things We Do For Love. Her current character Susannah is the delicious opposite. She's a complete lunatic, thrashing in anger on her in-laws' bed and giving herself robotic pep talks when she (thinks she) is alone.

Carson Elrod bursts through Kate and Malcolm's door looking like John Gallagher Jr. circa American Idiot (or was it Spring Awakening?) with black skinny jeans and bed head. "Burst" is the perfect term for his character Trevor; sexual tension mounts and causes him to kiss the wrong character, setting off the farce's sparks. Susannah also criticizes his "violent nature" throughout the play (although it is she who threatens to hit him with a vase). The pair is perfectly disastrous, making rude requests and messes left and right.

Herein lies the nervous laughter (or hesitation to laugh at all) in comedy; what is going on between Susannah and Trevor is not funny, far less so if one sees a touch of that chaos in their own relationship. "People do a lot of damage to each other with the best intentions. And I seem to write mostly about that. Love can do a lot of unintended damage," Ayckbourn once said. Whether Ayckbourn's comedy leaves you sleeping sweetly or lying awake, it is one audiences will not soon forget.

Photo Credit: Carol Rosegg

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