"Absurd Person Singular"
by Alan Ayckbourn
(through December 10, 1995) at The Round House Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland
Mitchell Patrick (left) as Geoffrey Jackson, and Richard Pilcher as Ronald
Brewster-Wright.
|
Alan Ayckbourn's farce “Absurd Person Singular” takes place in the kitchens of three different couples on three successive Christmas Eves -- past, present, and future. Act One takes place in the kitchen of Jane (Jane Beard) and Sidney Hopcraft (Marty Lodge). He is an up-and-coming builder and she is an obsessively meticulous homemaker whose kitchen floor is as gleaming as one could possibly imagine. Sidney has invited Christmas Eve guests who can help him climb the corporate ladder: Ronald (Richard Pilcher), a phlegmatic banker, and his heavy drinking wife Marion (Catherine Flye), and Geoffrey (Mitchell Patrick), another builder whose philandering ways border on the adolescent, and his neurotic wife Eva (Kathryn Kelley).
Eva’s Act Two kitchen is, by contrast, a cluttered one, strewn with drafts of her frantic attempts to complete a suicide note. Farce is the order of the evening and director Nick Olcott has cast and blocked his players expertly to get as much as possible from the comic situations and characterizations. But there is also a serious undertow of near black comedy proportions which peaks in Act Two when the forlorn and catatonic Eva tries every possible means to commit suicide: impaling herself on a knife, putting her head in the oven, swallowing pills, and hanging herself. Each of her thwarted attempts, however, elicits more laughter than the previous one. At the second intermission the audience is left wondering why such a potentially serious and desperate situation could possibly provide so much hilarity. While much of the on-stage action, entrances and exits are necessarily contrived in this genre, Director Olcott helps keep the mechanical nature of what transpires from distracting us from the humor he successfully tries to convey.
The Act Three kitchen is that of Marion, who has spent two weeks drunk in bed waiting for her husband to have the central heating fixed. Her stumbling entrance midway through the scene is a funny yet somehow poignant reminder of the privilege, charm and grace she drowned in gin years ago.
Each kitchen in this visually appealing production (designed perfectly by Dawn Robyn Petrlick) provides a setting for the uncovering of three failed marriages. The revealing of hypocrisy is surgically precise, thanks to Ayckbourn’s insightful writing and the unusually memorable characterizations provided by the excellent and uniformly consistent cast.
This is an inspired comedy dealing with matrimonial failure and chaos. Its themes are easily as fresh and provocative today as they were when they were written twenty years ago. “Absurd Person Singular” will provide a welcome tonic to the travails of the season for those who head for the Round House Theatre in search of an evening of pure madcap ingenuity.
For information and reservations for any of the following shows during The Round House Theatre's 1995-96 season call (301) 933-1644. Watch for The Round House Season's 1995-96 season which includes: Current (Closes December 10) - Absurd Person Singular by Alan Ayckbourn Opening January 31, 1996 - An Asian Jockey in our Midst by Carter W. Lewis Opening March 27 - An Almost Holy Picture by Heather McDonald Opening May 29 - The Sisterhood (translated from Moliere's Les Femmes Savantes)