“Feydeau-Si-Deau”
Written by Georges Feydeau
Showing: Theater Wit at Theatre Building, 1225 W. Belmont, through April 20
Tickets: $24
Phone: (773) 327-5252

By Lawrence Bommer

CFP theater editor

What’s a farce in fast-forward is a tragedy in slow motion. Played out in real time, Elliot Spitzer’s hypocritical philandering is a political and domestic disaster: Speed it up and he’d look like a horny clown bent on self-destruction.

Georges Feydeau’s classic farces, such as “Chemin-De-Fer” (first presented at Goodman Theatre and here rechristened “Feydeau-Si-Deau”), require an escape velocity too rapid for us to ask questions about coincidence or plausibility. It’s absurdist in its reduction of needy humans to embarrassing drives and double standards. Feydeau’s caricatures commit reflexive infidelities the way hamsters run their balls. Without admitting the slightest contradiction, they can be righteously jealous and cluelessly adulterous at the same time. The fact that they deserve each other doesn’t make the action any less, well, actionable.

Interestingly, in this comedy from 1904 it’s the wife who’s randy. Francine Chanal is eager to be unfaithful with Fedot (not the playwright, a stupid running joke reminds us), her husband’s prospective tenant and former schoolchum. In turn, she’s pursued by a klutzy politician Coustouillu.

Interfering in these attempted trysts, a drunken, gun-toting club member named Humbertin keeps barging into Francine’s busy love nest. Meanwhile, Fedot’s wife, herself pursued by a cipher named Belgence, refuses to countenance her husband’s serial betrayals. A year later, the newly emancipated spouses are mired in the same suspicions as before, with Chanal sentenced to the single life even though he’s the one husband who didn’t break a vow.

It’s a marital mess but, in Jeremy Wechsler’s staging, not a merry one. Unfortunately, it’s the dirty laundry of this nasty business, not the door-slamming hijinks, that register in this unpleasant romp. The action is fatally slowed down so we can see the ugly underbelly of bedroom farce. The strangely amoral second act in particular, with its clumsily explicit sex scenes and eardrum-damaging gunshots, leaves behind bad taste. By play’s end, the plot’s intrigue sparks interest but even on opening night there were scarce laughs. Sadly, the biggest guffaw came when a doorknob fell off. (Perhaps they can make sure it happens every night.)

Among the necessarily stylized performances, Ron Keaton’s Humbertin is W.C. Fields at his smarmiest, while Maggie Graham’s flapdoodle Francine resembles a three-dimensional Olive Oil, insipid and disingenuous. Kevin Theis’ cuckolding Fedot plays each shameful moment with scary conviction but, like all here, he’s mired in a pace that underlines the contrivances rather than speeds the complications. Cleverer than the staging is the scenic design, by Hang Le and Courtney O’Neill, in which a giant Eiffel Tower seems to squat over Feydeau’s sordid conniptions.