A Time-Traveling Farce in Southampton
These are turbulent times to land a sexual romp that relies on comic possibilities to outweigh its sexist tendencies. Not to mention that when “Boeing Boeing” was last staged on Broadway, it was co-produced by none other than Harvey Weinstein. If onstage farce relies on hairbreath timing, then the offstage timing of this one is pretty hilarious too.
Upon hearing the title of the play — “Boeing Boeing” — younger audiences might ask, “What, what?” Older audiences might recall a bedroom farce that had a brief run on Broadway in 1965, when the play is set, and a film version starring Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis, publicized as “the big comedy of nineteen-sexty-sex.” The play was revived for Broadway in 2008, backed by the Weinsteins, and featured a stellar cast that included Mark Rylance, who won one of the two Tony Awards the show earned. Written in 1962 by the French playwright Marc Camoletti and translated to English by Beverley Cross, “Boeing Boeing” is considered the most performed French play around the world.
And here it is on the East End until Nov. 5, the season opener for Center Stage Theatre, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary at the Southampton Cultural Center. Neil Simon once said, “The simplest aspect of farce is you need a lot of doors. And you need people to go running in and out of them, just missing each other.” Check, and check. There are seven doors onstage and six cast members, making it the epitome of a bedroom farce, featuring slamming doors, delicious innuendo, and spectacularly improbable situations. The basic premise involves Bernard (Dane DuPuis), a 1960s playboy (as they were called) who lives near the airport in Paris with a perpetually grumbling French housemaid (Catherine Maloney), and who has three air stewardess (as they were called) fiancées, each of whom thinks she’s the one and only. A scrupulous timetable keeps the raucous romances going until the day his childhood friend Robert (John Leonard), a shy and awkward provincial from Wisconsin, pays a visit to his apartment with the seven doors, and is unexpectedly thrust into a household saturated with panic and sex.
“It’s a completely nonsensical period piece,” said Michael Disher, the director and founder of Center Stage Theatre. “And it’s important to remember that it is a period piece, set during a time when flight attendants were like runway models in the air. It’s fun and frothy, a terrific tonic that is much needed right now.”
The sparse audience at the Sunday matinee agreed. They seemed to delight in the lusty and ludicrous stewardess-juggling shenanigans, the near misses, the pratfalls, and even the predictable head-on collision at the end — as well as a set that is tricked out in thoroughly mod ’60s style.
The female actors are the true force behind this production, each delivering an impeccable performance: Shannon DuPuis as Gloria the TWA air hostess, Samantha Honig as Gretchen from Lufthansa, and Josephine Wallace as Gabriella, the fiery Alitalia stewardess. But it is Catherine Maloney, a shaky French accent notwithstanding, who steals the show as the haughty maid Berthe. Ms. Maloney, a regular on community stages across the East End — and understandably so — is once again spot on with her delivery as a woman wearied by having to alternate between cook, pimp, and air traffic controller.
John Leonard gives a riotous performance as Robert, the virginal and unsophisticated friend from the Midwest, desperate to find just one woman with whom to settle down while watching his friend juggle three. It’s a nebbishy performance full of hyperventilating and brow mopping, and Mr. Leonard does it well.
Even in a play where audiences are willing to suspend disbelief, Dane DuPuis’s portrayal of Bernard, the Lothario lead tied up in amorous convolutions, is all wrong. Mr. DuPuis, the Southampton Cultural Center’s photographer and a relative newcomer to the stage, does not quite convey suave or debonair, or that panache particular to the “Mad Men” era. His romantic interactions with the stewardesses are boyish and silly. In an inexplicable styling choice, he sports a contemporary fade haircut and facial growth, making him more Justin Timberlake than 007.
But luckily, as Ray Cooney, Britain’s greatest farceur, once said, “Farce is teamwork. There is no standing behind beautiful monologues. It’s mundane language. The characters aren’t standing center-stage, spotlit, intellectualizing about their predicament. They’re rushing about dealing with it.”
And as such, this is a great team that delivers a mischievous romp about ordinary people who are out of their depth in a predicament that is beyond their control and that they are unable to contain. Sex is the McGuffin here. It’s all about love in the end.
“Boeing Boeing” will run until Nov. 5 at the Southampton Cultural Center, 25 Pond Lane, Thursdays and Fridays at 7 p.m., Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Tickets cost $25, $15 for students. Dinner and theater packages are available online at scc-arts.org or by calling the box office at 631-287-4377.