In a program note Czarny explains how this venture got started, an invitation from the Locker Room to revive at least one dinner theater in these perilous times. (Not mentioned is Doug Meech’s short-lived troupe In Good Company in the same location in 2002.) Ignoring such omens as the unemployment rate and the closing of P&C supermarkets, Czarny was more concerned that there were already about 30 outfits in the area, albeit none doing dinner theater at the moment. This leads to his defensive name, Not Another Theater Company, which will have to be changed if he succeeds and others fail.
A Syracuse New Times Syracuse Area Live Theater (SALT) Award nominee and a TANYS (Theater Association of New York State) Award-winning director, Czarny has worked with several local companies, most recently at the helm of Appleseed Productions’ well-received A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum last June. Subsequently Czarny and friends have launched an improv company called Don’t Feed the Actors, which has appeared at different local venues including Eastwood’s Palace Theatre. Improv calls on radically different skills than rigorously rehearsed, split-second timing of farce, but by drawing from the ranks of Don’t Feed the Actors players Czarny can at least be sure who knows how to get laughter from lines and double-takes. Run for Your Wife starts strong with explosive gags in the first three minutes and never suffers a dull moment after that.
London cabbie John Smith (David Vickers) has been gleefully enjoying the favors of two Mrs. Smiths without detection by neatly scheduling himself to be away from each home more than half the week. Short, glamorless Mary Smith (Anne Freund) in Wimbledon, given to hysterical tantrums, initially looks like the more the domestic of the two. Across town in Stretham, tall, exotic Barbara Smith (Rachelle Clavin), often seen in a thigh-revealing negligee, might be offering more bedroom allure. This well-laid plan goes awry when a minor accident puts John’s story in a newspaper, and two officers of the law come snooping. Self-important Sergeant Troughton (Dan Rowlands) follows the Wimbledon angle while distracted, somewhat oblivious Sergeant Porterhouse (Greg J. Hipius) takes the Stretham beat.
In a major step for Not Another Theater Company’s credibility, Czarny has brought in Indian-born architect Navroz Dabu, one of the most reliable set designers in community theater, to put Smith’s two apartments on stage simultaneously, Wimbledon in blue and white, Stretham in red and yellow. Not only does this speed the parallel stories, but sometimes portions of one apartment, Wimbledon, serves as an overflow for Stretham. We keep them sorted out. Although there are in fact two doors on the set, this is not a door-slamming farce because the action is too quick for that.
Only cabbie John’s pal Stanley Gardner (Gerrit Vander Werff Jr.) is in on the bigamy scheme, and the two men’s outrageous plans to get away with it are the tugboat that pulls this ship. But they take radically different styles. Vickers’ hard-driving John always assumes that the next cockamamie ploy, such as eating the page of a newspaper to destroy evidence, is going to work. Vernder Werff’s Stanley, who’s better connected with reality, has to carry all the reactions, the double-takes, fast and slow burns. He also bears most of the gag lines. Sergeant Troughton: “So they died by falling off a cliff?” Stanley (consoling): “Yes, they went quickly.”
Part of Stanley’s shtick makes him accommodating but unbending. After keeping collected through all of John’s multiple lies and fabricated identities, he balks at posing as a gay man: “Tell people I’m a homosexual? I’ve had trouble telling people I’m a homo sapien.”
Which doesn’t mean Run for Your Wife can’t offer up some gay humor. That arrives in the paint-spattered person of Bobby Franklin (Stephfond Brunson), Nancy Smith’s upstairs neighbor in Stretham. Instead of speaking with a Jamaican accent that might have been possible, Brunson speaks with the same lower-class non-Cockney accent that all the other characters stick to unfailingly. Muscular but fussy rather than swishy, Brunson gets his required laughs without employing the broad caricatures in the two rival productions mounted by the Talent Company and Theatre ’90 in 1999.
Fast as the pace has been, Czarny turns up the speed in the last 15 minutes while mistaken identities and dissolving schemes escalate, without anyone missing a beat or cue. Along the way Mary Smith loses her dress to reveal that the sexual dynamics of the arrangement were more compelling than we had first thought. There was fire in John Smith’s madness all along.
Everyone in the cast delivers well, even with the weakest lines. Vickers and Vander Werff might start as a mismatched comic duo, but they keep sparking over two hours of tomfoolery. Czarny’s company is ready for the challenge, with the dinner-theater package offered at rock-bottom prices: $27 for single admission, $50 for a couple, and $18 for the play without dining.
This production runs through Saturday, Feb. 6. See Times Table for information.
