Run for Your Wife
In farce as in life, we find comfort in the familiar. Of course writers of farce inflate everyday human interactions to impossible levels: doors slam and telephones ring more frequently than in any sane household. But actions and motives pushed to their most illogical heights become logical once again, and identities crossed enough times make the truth more engaging than any lie. Farce challenges us to cast far-fetched situations in ordinary human terms–no matter how ridiculous things get, there’s always something at the core that audiences can connect with. Sometimes a plate of sardines is an elaborate ruse to cover up infidelity, and sometimes–well, it’s just a plate of sardines.
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No one understands this better than British playwright Ray Cooney. Unlike Michael Frayn’s slumming in the genre, which produced the funny but disingenuous Noises Off, Cooney’s work does not smack of ulterior motives, like poking fun at the conventions of farce. And unlike Alan Ayckbourn, a self-styled intellectual with a demonstrated weakness for overly intricate plotting, Cooney doesn’t appear to be sensitive about toiling within a “low” genre. As a result he’s content to keep things simple, a tactic that works. Cooney’s best-known piece, the 1982 Run for Your Wife, ran for eight years in London. And while his plays aren’t particularly literary, they are culturally important: in 1998 a panel at the Royal National Theatre named Run for Your Wife one of the 100 most significant English-language plays of the century, alongside works by guys named Shaw, O’Casey, and Stoppard.
Of course, the sign of a good production is that it transports you to a place where you never have to think about these things. Attic Playhouse director David Belew must’ve rehearsed the show like a drill sergeant–his production is seamless. And despite the technical demands of staging a show with hundreds of cues, Belew and his cast give every one of the 134 or so pairs of entrances and exits (I counted door slams) absolute authority. On the night I attended, one door took so much punishment that the molding around the frame came unglued twice. Oddly enough, this chink in the show’s armor proved its defining moment–the hallmark of an unpretentious yet forceful production of an unpretentious yet well-crafted play.
Director David Mink appeared in Drury Lane’s production of Run for Your Wife in 1991, and his warm program note–detailing his experience opening the show on the first day of Operation Desert Storm–suggests that this staging was motivated more by nostalgia than anything else. Admittedly, it’s neat to see how he’s adapted Caught in the Net to the constraints of an in-the-round staging–the entrances and exits must remain open, and the actors run down long aisles to take the stage. Mink’s cast is full of smart performers too: ShawChicago vet Adrianne Cury, as one of the wives, and Jack Hickey, who plays John Smith as a fitfully nervous rube.
