Flashback to the Future

Although flying under the aegis of
Appleseed Productions, which again holds court at the Atonement
Lutheran Church, 116 W. Glen Ave., Doors represents yet another
British comedy from a coterie of pals, such as director Dan Stevens and
his wife Nora O’Dea, Fitzgerald and her husband Roy vanNorstrand, and
others. They clearly love the material, and they know how to do the
accents. Earlier productions, like Joe Orton’s pitch-black comedies or
breathless-paced farces, were harder to pull off. Alan Ayckbourn
comedies make a for better fit, in part because all shows open with a
small-town company composed of friends who are used to bouncing off
each other and delight in going against type, like Fitzgerald’s Poopay. 

Communicating Doors opened in
Scarborough in February 1994. Time is important to the action. In the
first scene we see a large calendar on a door announcing the year
“2028,” even though everyone, including Poopay, is in contemporary
dress. We quickly find that the man who has hired her, Reece Welles
(Roy vanNorstrand), is not interested in her usual professional
services but instead wants her to witness a document outlining the
horrendous deeds he has committed in a lifetime, including the murder
of two wives. He’s gray and wheezing and claims to be near death. 

The lack of interest on the part of
Britishers in Poopay’s services (tools of the trade are in her purse)
is an ongoing gag in the first act, along with Poopay’s always
announcing her line of work in falling cadences, as if she really gave
pedicures. She’s a smart girl, though, and soon recognizes that
knowledge of the confession puts her in danger. So she hides in a
closet, which Reece’s bullet-headed henchman Julian (Rick Signorelli)
tells us is no route to escape.

Only it is. In the well-oiled set
constructed by William Edward White, what appears to be a closet
rotates on its axis, with translucent screens on the side so we can see
in as it turns. As it rotates we hear futuristic music, possibly
rejected by a Flash Gordon serial or an early draft of The Twilight Zone. Both
sides of the closet taken together are the “Communicating Doors” of the
title. When Poopay re-enters the set she looks the same, but on the
door behind her is pasted a calendar with the enlarged date, “2008.”
And here Poopay meets a well-bred blonde named Ruella (Nora O’Dea),
Reece’s first wife, on the date his confession says she was to be
murdered.

Once we’re returned to the present,
Reece reappears looking chipper and much less gray and annoyed that a
tawdry stranger like Poopay is in the apartment. Present also is an
officious but oblivious house detective named Harold (David J. Hubert),
with gray hair and a balloon-shaped torso. In partial response to the
danger presented to her, Ruella enters the communicating doors and is
transported to 1988 where, in the very same apartment, she finds her
partially clad husband, now looking positively boyish, frolicking with
the barefoot nymph Jessica (Jennifer DeCook), who turns out to be
Reece’s first wife. House detective Julian has shrunk to a sleek young
man. VanNorstrand, incidentally, shaved his in-life grayish beard to
allow his character to shed 40 years.

Ayckbourn would never be confused with
Agatha Christie, but any attempts to rewrite history are bound to bring
unexpected, even unwanted, consequences. This means that plot twists
and reversals cannot be revealed. What can be relayed are some of the
plot fillips that Ayckbourn inserts to delight audiences along the way.
For example, house detective Harold, always on the wrong track, thinks
that Poopay and first wife Jessica are lesbian lovers. So he’s sure he
understands what’s really going on when he encounters Poopay
and Jessica grunting and groaning as they heave together to pull up
Ruella, who has fallen off a balcony.

Director Stevens could turn up the
volume in some scenes, especially when characters shout out necessarily
exposition from behind closed doors, i.e., from behind the set. And the
sotto voce tone in the last scene deprived people beyond the
second row of tables of some of the production’s best jokes. In
general, though, Communicating Doors is the area premiere of a British confection where a group of friends share their fun with the audience for the holidays.   

This production runs through Dec. 20. See Times Table for information.