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A Flea in Her Ear
Reviewed by Myron Meisel
A Noise Within
Through November 22
RECOMMENDED:
Georges Feydeau has been a prime shaper of boulevard farce to the percussive opening and closing of doors, less often seen in actual performance stateside. Though his sense of carpentered construction may have owed a debt to such predecessors as Eugène Marin Labiche (The Italian Straw Hat), Feydeau took delight in prolix plot mechanics to intricately frenzied heights with a keener wit reminiscent of golden age French comedy, if without the piercing acuity of Molière or Corneille. Action here replaces psychology, which is not a bad strategy in live theater either for knowing yowls or titters of rueful recognition.
A Noise Within’s latest repertory season leads off with Feydeau’s best-known work, A Flea in Her Ear, the first of David Ives’s (Venus in Fur) series of “translaptations” of French comedies, which have included School of Lies from Molière and The Heir Apparent from Jean-François Regnard (staged earlier this year in Long Beach). Here Ives’s clever reimagining necessarily must track the original blueprints conscientiously, while freely toying with the character types and making the verbal jokes work for our modern ears. However jaded those may be, nothing this side of Noises Off quite matches the relentless freneticism of Feydeau farce unchained.
To invoke the title of one of David Ives’s own great successes, it’s All in the Timing. Like a soufflé, Feydeau is either just right or a dud. Director Julia Rodriguez-Elliott runs everyone through efficiently headlong paces, not easily maintained through three rigorously separate acts that demand two intermissions and require the engines to rev up after each break. Like the City Garage Tartuffe, invoking 1950s Paris proves a felicitous period more agreeably assimilable from a contemporary perspective.
Curiously, for all the bravura comic pyrotechnics of Act 2’s frantic tag and hide-and-go-seek bordello sequences, the elaborate development of Act 1’s initial setup — so often tediously tied to earlier rules of dramaturgy — arguably delivers even more pronounced laughs. An accomplished comedy-writing team like Feydeau + Ives can make the art of loading the gun even more boffo than the gag when it goes off.
It’s a strong ensemble, A Noise Within’s longest suit, but arguably no one could resist its spasms of inspired wackiness. Camille, afflicted with a speech impediment that cannot pronounce consonants, the sort of convention no longer permissible without air-quote irony, is here so inventively incarnated by Rafael Goldstein that the disorder transcends issues of political correctness. To a lesser degree, the stereotype of jealous Spanish husband with a pistol is nearly as well overcome by Luis Fernandez-Gil’s zealous embrace of all the ridiculousness of the role. Contrastingly, the ever-versatile Joshua Wolf Coleman instills an insinuating quality as an ambiguous doctor in the first act that one wishes paid off more heartily than the way in which the script strands him.
The rap against Feydeau is that his fabulous machines overwork themselves into repetitively contrived wind-up toys. That isn’t quite fair, though those resistant to farce in general may well share that view. That said, Feydeau isn’t quite as pertinent to our sensibilities as the more pomo-Anglo fancies of Michael Frayn or Alan Ayckbourn. And neither A Flea in Her Ear nor do any of Ives’s other vintages of new wines in old bottles hold a candle to their shared source masterpiece, Corneille’s The Liar, which compounds its genius with Ives’s own offhandedly fluid wordplay in rhyming couplets, no less
A Flea in Her Ear, A Noise Within, 3352 East Foothill Blvd., Pasadena, (in repertory) Fri., Oct. 2, 8 p.m.; Sat., Oct. 3, 2 & 8 p.m.; Thurs., Oct. 22, 7:30 p.m.; Fri., Oct. 23, 8 p.m.; Sun., Nov. 1, 2 & 7 p.m.; Sat., Nov. 7, 2 & 8 p.m.; Thurs., Nov. 12, 7:30 p.m.; Fri., Nov. 13, 8 p.m.; Sun., Nov. 22, 2 & 7 p.m., (626) 356-3100 x1, anoisewithin.org. Running time: two hours, 30 minutes.
