Alarms And Excursions is not, as its name might imply, a compilation of Shakespearean battle scenes. Subtitled "More Plays Than One," it is, in fact, a two-hour package of eight one-act farces that zip along with nary a slow, serious or sentimental moment in their entirety.
Four of the plays deal with the hazards of technology: In Alarms, a dinner party is reduced to chaos by a malfunctioning 1 ) bottle opener, 2 ) smoke detector, 3 ) oven timer, 4 ) cordless phone, 5 ) car alarm. Glassnost presents us with a pompous stateswoman prepared to address the nation, only to discover her oratory sabotaged by a disgruntled teleprompter operator. Loud music leads to a false rapport among cocktail-party guests, with violent results, in Heart To Heart. While Excursions' villain is a solitary answering machine, at whose behest a husband and wife, their foreign visitor, and the wife's elderly mother, are sent careening through two airports, a subway station, a fast-food café, a seedy pub, and several rainy streets.
It's not all the fault of the gadgets, however. After the dinner party damage has been cleared up, the diners resist parting until they have concluded their aborted prandial conversation. Flight attendants delivering air-safety instructions take advantage of passenger inattention to have some fun, and employees at a testimonial banquet struggle to applaud the honorees while juggling briefcases, transcripts, buffet plates and wine glasses. Even a modest country hotel with no automated amenities provokes its share of amusement—and not a little self-examination—as two couples listen to one another through the common wall shared by their respective rooms.
Director Ted Hoerl and his cast resist the temptation to inject "issues" into Frayn's effervescent hi-jinks, instead keeping the characterizations slick, frustrations exaggerated and injuries more embarrassing than debilitating to guarantee us guilt-free enjoyment of their discomfort.
Dialect coach Belinda Bremner renders each personality safely distant from ours: the vacationing couples' rural accents, for example, make it quite acceptable for the hubs to blame their wives for the mess, and vice-versa.
But the real star of the show is Sound Designer Victoria DeIorio's precision-timed collection of electronic chirps, whistles, howls, buzzes and robot-voices that constitute a presence all on their own.