For all our modern advances, a happy marriage remains a mystery.  It’s easy to laugh at other couples’ difficulties while mired in our own.  Then, when a happy couple goes by we want to know their secret.  Are they that happy all the time? What is their secret?  Theatre Three provides a merry peek into the marriage mysteries in Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce.  Don’t expect to leave with the answer, though.  It turns out farce is as much of a mystery as marriage.

Staged in the round (of course) set designer Jeffry Schmidt gives each of the three bedrooms its own raked platform and unique flavor.  The older folks have a bed so high it has it’s own stairs.  The youngest folks’ is decorated with the disorder of having just moved in.  The last bedroom is the most stylish with a low platform bed and arching lamp.  This set up allows us to compare the couples’ relationships and their effect on one another as the events unfold.  Lighting by David Gibson designed the lights to draw focus back and forth, though an opening night a glitch kept blinking the lights distractedly.

The play takes place from dusk to dawn.  As the oldest couple, Delia and Ernest, played by Connie Nelson and Terry Vandivort get ready to go out for their anniversary, the youngest couple, Malcolm and Kate, played by Jason Kennedy and Tiffany Lonsdale-Hands are playing practical jokes instead of getting ready for the party they are throwing.  Ayckbourne has layered in some deep themes in the juxtaposition of these but Jac Alder’s direction chooses to move past without making much of the seemingly older predictably dull couple vs. the young exciting couple.  In the last apartment on stage we meet Jan (Ginger Goldman) who is going to the young couple’s party without husband Nick (Linus Craig) because he has thrown out his back.  By this point we have heard a lot about Trevor (B.J. Cleveland), who is the older couple’s son, and Susannah (Jody Rudman) and the trouble they are having.  They’ll be at the party too.   Oh, and Jan was with Trevor before she married Nick.  It is a farce, you know.  When we meet Trevor, he is an obnoxious, self-obsessed buffoon, and Susannah is a wreck of modern self-help affectation—what a match!  Somehow Trevor ends up kissing old flame Jan and Susannah walks in.  But by morning, things have worked out for all of the couples, because it is a farce.

Alan Ayckbourn defines the word prolific at some seventy plays.  He must be doing something right.  His easily accessible and commercially successful style seems like a perfect fit for Theatre Three, but Ayckbourn is more than just a pretty playwright. He is a genius at creating plays that contain laugh-covered pills.  Comedy makes the medicine go down.  At some point in his plays, you realize that some of the audience is laughing at the things you aren’t.  It is not just different points of view being represented; its different avenues into his message.  In the case of Bedroom Farce, he seems to take the old adage that marriage troubles start in the bedroom and rearranges it to say that troubles start in the marriage.  With four flawed couples, the audience is not given a winning pair to pick.  Some producers get Ayckbourn wrong and think this means his message is bleak.  Truth is, he is saying that although the troubles start in the marriage, they end in the bedroom.  Jac Alder wisely keeps his production light and ends up with a pleasant evening of marriage mishap and make-up.  Not bad considering the task.  After all, to rephrase the old adage: Marriage is easy.  Farce – that’s hard.

But pleasant doesn’t match the potential.  The one time the audience got a glimpse of what could be came when Kate (Lonsdale-hands) makes Malcolm (Jason Kennedy) promise to tell her if he ever gets bored with her…in bed.  Distracted by his IKEA-like furniture project he agrees only to hear her in a tiny voice promise to tell him if she gets bored…with him…in bed.  All of a sudden the show held in stillness like a gymnast on the parallel bars, the ramifications dawning on the audience.  For a few beats, the audience lapped up the jabs and slights.  What had been a docile crowd of smilers turned into potential daytime talk show laugh riot.  And then it was gone.  But in that moment we saw the power of what Ayckbourne could illicit.

His plays can be funny on that “Oh-No-You-Dint” level, though you would rarely see one achieve that on this side of the Atlantic.  Most Americans don’t seem to have the precision of performance required to lift the play beyond standard situation comedy.  Of all genres, farce requires the most teamwork.  It’s as if a group of people decided to blow a soap bubble out of a hula-hoop.  Nothing less than the precise placement of equal effort will succeed.  When it works, the energy released is atomic laughter.  When it doesn’t, you get smiles and nods.   Theatre three’s cast is capable and given time might yet inflate this comedy sphere to explosive effect, but they’ll have to work together.  Sounds like a prescription for a happy marriage.  Maybe it’s not such a mystery after all.

Photo: Ken Birdsell