The thing you want to do when you produce a farce is to come out with high energy and get the audience laughing in the early going so that they are used to it and will laugh along the rest of the night.
That’s the recipe for a great production, and a good farce creates opportunities for laughter almost from the very start.
Unfortunately, Soulstice Theatre's production of "Moon Over Buffalo" doesn’t get going until there are only about five minutes left in the play. By then, the urge to laugh has left on a train to nowhere, and it’s hard to get into the mood after all this falderal.
"Buffalo," written in 1996 by Ken Ludwig, isn’t a great play. But it’s not a bad play either. What it requires is precise comic timing and an ability to hold things back before you hit the audience with the joke. You need levels in a farce, and the levels are missing in this production.
The story is about a traveling troupe of actors led by the aging George and Charlotte Hay, who are doing a repertory of "Private Lives" and "Cyrano." The play has everything you might expect from a farce, and this one had a good run on Broadway and in London.
It has love triangles, doors that slam open and closed, entrances and exits at a frantic pace, pitiful things and wonderful things, frustrated lovers, mismatched pairs, excessive drinking, lines missed and messed up, and problems that seem insoluble.
Ludwig wrote this for laughs, and it’s laughs you expect.
Early in the play, I found myself waiting to hear expected laughs, as when the grandfather (Don Devona) talks to his granddaughter Rosalind (Shannon Nettesheim) about her father, George (Michael Chabanoff).
"The man is a walking ham," he says. "They should stick cloves in him and serve him with pineapple."
It’s a joke. Maybe not a fall on the floor knee slapper, but it ought to be worth a mild chuckle or two. Instead, this audience sat silent and non-responsive. I watched carefully to see if that joke, or the others that came along, were registering with this crowd. They were not.
As the first act dragged into the second, we just got more and more of this kind of joke without a laugh. George has a brief fling with the young ingenue Eileen (Amanda Carson), and she is pregnant. She is going to miss a matinee because of an appointment with a doctor. George hopefully asks if it’s possible that she may not really be pregnant.
"I’m pregnant, George" she shrieks at him. "Believe me. I’m two weeks late, and I’ve been tossing my guts up every morning for three days. What do you think it is?"
We know we are being set up, and we’re waiting for the punch line.
"Bad oyster," George asks. But he makes it a question, which is what it says in the script. And there was absolutely no laughter. Better, perhaps, if he jumped on her final word and avowed that it must have been a "bad oyster." Put an exclamation mark at the end. You might get a laugh.
That is really what a farce is all about, getting laughs. The story matters, but the jokes are the key.
The play hits its rhythm after almost 90 minutes of waiting. Rosalind thinks the troupe is doing a matinee of "Private Lives." She stands on the set, uttering her first line, calling for Elli, her new husband, being played by George.
He doesn’t enter, and Nettesheim – the lone sparkle in this production – does wonders with the "waiting for Elli" stuff, until finally he enters, dressed as Cyrano. For the next five minutes, chaos reigns and we see a fully developed farce. The audience responded in suit with equally chaotic laughter.
But it took forever. When you are acting in a comedy, the hope is that you distinguish between the setup and the punch line. If you perform all of it at the same level – emotional, physical and aural – the audience is going to miss a lot of the humor.
In a farce, we don’t have to identify with the characters. We don’t even care particularly if they are realistic. All we want is for them to be funny.
The funny in this production came way too late, and by the time they got to it, the laughter came as much out of surprise at how they finally got to the jokes as it did at the jokes themselves.
"Moon Over Buffalo" runs through Nov. 22 and information on showtimes and tickets is available here.
With a history in Milwaukee stretching back decades, Dave tries to bring a unique perspective to his writing, whether it's sports, politics, theater or any other issue.
He's seen Milwaukee grow, suffer pangs of growth, strive for success and has been involved in many efforts to both shape and re-shape the city. He's a happy man, now that he's quit playing golf, and enjoys music, his children and grandchildren and the myriad of sports in this state. He loves great food and hates bullies and people who think they are smarter than everyone else.
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