Playwright: adapted by Page Hearn from the novels of P.G. Wodehouse
At: City Lit Theater Company at
Edgewater Presbyterian Church,
1020 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.
Phone: ( 773 ) 293-3682; $18-$25
Runs through: June 12
Before departing to seek his fortune in the Big Apple, City Lit managing director Page Hearn left his venerable company one more Wodehouse adaptation, the seventeenth in the series begun over two decades past. This time, the screwball-comedy plot concerns the foozly Earl of Emsworth and the stuffy Sir Gregory Parsloe, each of whose farms houses a potentially prize-winning pig, the rivalry thus engendered being sufficiently intense to inspire sabotage. Further complicating matters are three pair of ambivalent lovers, among them a visiting American heiress courted by her parents' preferred suitor, but secretly in love with a humble novelist. Enter aged-playboy Galahad Threepwood and merry-widow Maudie Stubbs, two inveterate meddlers determined to right matters.
Now, consider that all these personalities—not to mention assorted butlers, constables, rental agents and pig wranglers—are played by only eight actors.
In order for us to keep up with this slight-of-hand, we must be immediately cognizant of precisely who we are watching at every moment. Rather than simply relying on changes of costume or wigs, however, director Martha Adrienne—drawing on her musical expertise, perhaps—pushes her cast beyond the limits of their native midwestern vocal ranges, the wider aural vocabulary and increased attention to phrasing permitting characters to be distinguished by their voices. With the resources for invention thus expanded, such declarations as 'There was a grain of sand in his spiritual spinach' are rendered much funnier than one would expect.
The athletics associated with, for example, the abduction and sequestering of large and temperamental livestock, requires an ensemble as physically agile as they are verbally articulate. Don Bender returns as the urbane Galahad, a geezer who can juggle a monocle, walking-stick AND greet good news with a jubilant 'I believe in fairies! There IS a santa claus!', flanked by Jan Blixt and Deanna Boyd as a pair of sirens ( scrumptiously-gowned by Tina Haglund ) , and veteran City Lit farceurs George Seegebrecht, Christian Gray and Jonathan Nichols as assorted dimwits and windbags, with Thad Anzur and Melanie Esplin supplying the straight lines. Stealing the show, however, are property designer Carole Pohn's charming porkies. Eat your heart out, Miss Piggy!