Ménage À Quatre

Daniel Montgormery, Matthew Downs, Sarah Wolter, Jeremy S. Walker and Carly J. Casey (Photo by Frank Ishman)

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Cheaters. Not tax cheats. Not conmen. You won’t find those cheats all over dramatic literature dating back to the ancient Romans. But cheating spouses, yes, they’re everywhere, having saturated the history of the theater. Our fascination with the art and farce of infidelity simply doesn’t wane. It’s as cosmopolitan as it is timeless.

In my theater classes at Cal State, for the plays written by students who have never before written a play, or thought about writing a play, or attended a live play, there is one pervasive genre that constitutes 60%-70% of their original plays: the cheating boyfriend. Which leads to the cheating boyfriend getting busted. These 20-year-olds can’t get enough of double dealers (sometimes men, sometimes women) getting exposed and humiliated, the shameless getting shamed.  Their glee in this genre is as hard-wired as DNA into to our cultural subconscious, and makes one wonder if it hasn’t suddenly, for no good reason, become an anachronism. Perhaps, today, this is nostalgia for a time, let’s say 2015, when shamelessness wasn’t its own reward.

Playwright-TV-producer novelist Peter Lefcourt’s new play Ménage À Quatre follow four friends from West L.A. who are close, too close for comfort, with two of them, a man and woman who are not spouses, stealing off to a motel room in Tarzana, thereby betraying their spouses and their respective best friends. (Sneaking off is bad enough, but to Tarzana?)

Ryan O’Connor stages the comedy in two tones that are consistent with the author’s intentions. The first comports with the door-slamming French farce lunacy of playwright Georges Feydeau, whose characters’ infidelities go awry. One such scene here occurs on a bed, naturally, with all four entangled in each other, screaming, having lost their minds. This is not an orgy. They’re all clothed. It’s more akin to a collective mental collapse as the last vestige of an emotional collapse. But it’s farce, nonetheless.

The second tone, that lies beneath the first, is of a slightly more meditative quality, invoking what Lefcourt describes as his inspiration from film directors Bertrand Blier and Louis Malles, whose cheating characters aim to rationalize and even justify their betrayals. This is some combination of psychology and extremely dubious philosophy. To paraphrase: “I’m cheating on you to keep our spark alive.”  The rationalization sounds almost Trumpian in its circular duplicity.

We’re introduced first to our blithe and swishy narrator (Daniel Montgomery) doubling with panache and skill as a private eye named Ezra Pound, hired by attorney Gary (Jeremy S. Walker) to check up on Gary’s perky, redheaded cardio-vascular surgeon wife, Jeannie (Carly J. Casey). Honestly! These people don’t have enough drama in their professional lives that they have to manufacture more in their personal ones?  What triggers Gary’s suspicions? Her aloofness towards him, combined with the giveaway: She presents him with an expensive cashmere sweater. Not his birthday. No reason. That’s out of character for her and a telling sign of her guilt over something. But what?

Ezra Pound discovers the worst. Jeannie in flagrante dilecto with Gary’s best buddy —  burly, beer-swilling swimming-pool contractor, Reuben (Matthew Downs), who is doing very well, fiscally, in the swimming pool biz.

Along with Gary, left out in the cold is Rueben’s wife, Meg (Sarah Wolter), a free-spirited, morally grounded yet phallically obsessed sculptor who specializes is three dimensional portrayals of male genitalia, derived from and inspired by live models. In pursuit of her art, however, she is unwaveringly professional.

There comes a time in a play such as this that one ceases to dwell on questions of verisimilitude, on the grounds that everyone in this play is out of their mind. This is not a critique of the play. Rather, it’s a surrender to it.

When the busted couple must reckon with whether or not to continue their double deceit (of spouse and friend), their respective moral compasses start to point in different directions. Should the spurned Meg and Gary hook up to even the scales? Even with their spouse’s consent? Is such retribution justice? And does such justice have anything to do with preserving a marital bond?

Where the play departs from the station of farce and approaches a destination of moral reckoning, it starts to take on a gravitas, as though it’s actually about something meaningful. But have no fear. It’s not really about anything but its own tropes, like froth from a lager. Blow across the top of the mug and its gone.

But even the illusion of depth, which this play contains, would not be possible if Lefcourt didn’t delight in investing his characters with at least some contradictions and inner torment. Nor would this be possible if the actors didn’t bring these mostly piffly characters to life with such conviction and charm, played out on Brad Bentz’s flexible, quasi-realistic but dream-like set.

This production made me feel like a 20-year-old stumbling across an idea as old as a Roman comedy, and imagining that I’d invented it. The idea of hopeless, pointless, endless infidelity resonated in the bones then, just as it does now.

Davidson/Valentini Theatre, Los Angeles LGBT Center, 1125 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood. Opens Sat., July 19; Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 2 pm; thru Aug. 17. www.Onstage411.com/Quatre 90 minutes without intermission