Tinkle Twinkle
The first surprise hits before you sit down. To get to Studio 116, the black-box space where the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s graduate theater department is staging Present Laughter with a brittle elegance, you must burrow several floors beneath the Kansas City Repertory Theatre into the halls of subterranean academia. Passing Coke-machine lounges and pegboards thick with summer-stock fliers, your heart may sink: Noel Coward in a basement feels as right as Chekhov on Ice. Hook a left into the theater, though, and you’re lifted to the penthouse in a breath. Here’s a parlor as sumptuous as the inside of a jewelry box, all wine-red walls and chessboard tiling, lovingly friezed and knick-knacked to extravagance: carved knights and cherubim, a gilded liquor cart and — most important — a baby grand.
The piano is key to the second surprise. At showtime, Tony Bernal (of Bar Natasha) settles in and tickles out a chipper number — nothing surprising, because Coward plays sometimes come spiced with Coward songs or other period standards. But this one stings, and lyrics such as Cancer is killing/Texaco’s spilling/The whole world’s gone to hell didn’t quite prep me for the chorus’ big reveal. Everything is super when you’re gay, Bernal sings. No joke: This light-comedy thouroughbred, ostensibly about the woman-on-man romantic travails of a hammy stage actor, is overtured by South Park‘s “The Big Gay Al Song.”
Bernal polished that off with cheery impudence and then accompanied the principal actors as they saddled the warhorses of the American songbook: “Someone to Watch Over Me” and “Anywhere I Hang My Hat Is Home,” each given the kind of sturdy, respectful treatment that makes me sometimes prefer actors singing to singers singing. The songs serve as off-book soliloquies, making Bernal’s opener all the more curious once the play is up and chattering. The show centers on Garry Essendine (Patrick Du Laney), lord of the postwar theater and point of gravitation for any number of lovers, admirers and employees. One of Essendine’s least interesting “satellites” is Bernal’s big gay Morris, a business associate. Whereas Essendine is a great dessert of a part that Coward wrote for himself, Morris is an uncrackable nut, a plot-driving part that few actors (including Bernal) could make much of. But here’s Surprise No. 3. He’s the crux of Present Laughter‘s love triangle, a man tomcatting around with the wife of his (and Essendine’s) dear friend and business partner. Morris claims to love her, and Bernal plays this affair straight in every sense of the word, leaving me to wonder: What the hell is going on here?
This question deepens a play too often considered an inconsequential delight. Perpetually beset by women who ache to be his lover, the effete Essendine lives in a state of impending farce. Du Laney’s deft performance makes clear that, for all of Essendine’s hilarious complaints about the chaos around him, he likes this life — or playing it, at least. Fighting off the beautiful women toward whom he seems to feel little sexual heat, he gets caught up quoting Shelley, which only works up his suitors more.
The big joke here is that Essendine can’t stop acting. (In this production, his home even comes equipped with a proscenium thrust.) This also might be his tragedy: He plays the cad, though he really isn’t one. At the climax, he winds up back with his estranged wife, a pants-wearing, sexless and inexplicably supportive woman played with clipped brio by Elana Kepner. The wife left Essendine years ago, but, over the course of the play, she lavishes him with gifts and helps his mistresses escape his home three times. Their reconciliation feels nothing like the triumphant final hook-up in His Girl Friday (or in any other remarriage comedy); instead, it stinks of business and beards, of more acting, as if Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman gave it one last go-round.
Or maybe all of this is just an agile, funny play, bristling with wit. Director Joseph Price’s production is as pitched and tuned as that baby grand, and he gets inventive work from his actors. David M. Fehr, as a dapper valet, unveils his third riotous British accent in a year. (It certainly helps that he exclaims things like “Now she’s a saucy monkey!”)
In the rest of the ensemble, the women fare better than the men. As an intense, pratfalling playwright, David Bianco’s face too often reveals an actor contemplating his next crazed flourish. (Some of those flourishes work.) Anna Safar is the show’s comic peak, a teensy dowager swaddled in furs and delusions. Before Caroline Perreault’s first entrance as the sexpot Joanna, other characters have called her “a diamond-studded siren” and “a scalp hunter”; when she shows up to seduce Essendine, bursting ripely from her gown and tugging her long gloves off one finger at a time, the air around her trembles. She more than lives up to her billing.
In essence, the entire show does as well: Present Laughter, it’s called, in what might as well be a stage instruction. But in typical UMKC fashion, this production presents far more, with depth and style.
