Perfect during a recession

Courtesy of Yale Rep

(Drawing Courtesy Of Yale Rep)

The Servant of Two Masters

Ends April 3. Yale University Theatre, 222 York St. $10-$35. 203-432-1234, yalerep.org.

There are plenty of pitfalls associated with pratfalls, and director Christopher Bayes and playwright Constance Congdon are serious about avoiding them.

Well, maybe not “serious.” When Congdon says the Yale Rep staging of Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters represents “the authenticity of commedia,” she’s not talking about another overpoeticized, balletic crap production that respects all the fun out of the genre. She asserts that this Servant is sassy, defiantly “not boring, cute or precious.”

“These are the funniest actors I’ve worked with in my life,” says Bayes, who handpicked his cast so as to “put together an acting company that felt like a company.” The director knew that the performers had to know and trust each other for the tricky, interactive antics to excel.

Likewise, Congdon, whose 14-year-old adapation of the 265-year-old Goldoni text is being used for this production (and who’ll be recalled locally for her fart-joke-filled version of Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid, which Elm Shakespeare Co. performed in Edgerton Park last summer), insists that “you have to have a sense of play” for the script to work. “It’s for actors who play off each other.” So, she’s been attending rehearsals, helping rework punchlines for maximum impact. At Bayes’ request, she even added a song-and-dance prologue to make the anything-goes comic crusade abundantly clear.

The Servant of Two Masters is an opportunity for audiences to see what Bayes has been doing for years with the Physical Acting program he leads at the Yale School of Drama. Before he was picked for that gig 10 years ago, the program was more dance-oriented. “I’m more about clowning,” Bayes says. His work has burst out of the classroom before this: The class commedia project he did last year went on to the New York Fringe Theatre festival, while this year’s is set to travel to Istanbul.

Those Drama School projects are original clown pieces in the accustomed commedia style — a surefire formula that’s worked for centuries, creating many of the archetypal characters we now associate with shows like “The Simpsons” or “SNL.”

When the Rep asked Bayes to direct something in the commedia line for the current season, his first choice was to do Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist, a heavily politicized farce about governmental power-abuse written in the 1970s.

When that fell through, Bayes opted for a standard of the genre, Goldoni’s fleet-footed story about a servant who doubles his income — and the potential for chaos — by serving two employers without their knowledge. The impetus for these very different choices was the same: Bayes wanted a great lead role for Steven Epp, whom he’d worked with for years in the acclaimed commedia-conscious Minnesota troupe Theatre de la Jeune Lune.

A comedy about the overworked, underappreciated and extremely rascally lower classes should have profound appeal during a recession. But Bayes and Congdon have special reason to be optimistic about Goldoni connecting with modern Connecticut theatergoers; they’ve seen it slay audiences here already. The world premiere of Congdon’s version of The Servant of Two Masters was at Hartford Stage in 1996, with Bayes in its hyperkinetic cast. And Bayes is bolstering the play with a live band.

The integrity of classic commedia is intact; what this crew is intent on is urgency. As for timeliness, Congdon mentions a speech the main female character, Smeralidina, gives about infidelity:

“Women become notorious when they are unfaithful, yet men cheat all the time, and are shocked when women do. And who exactly do these men think they do their cheating with? When it comes to women, everyone gossips; when it comes to men, nobody says a word. We aren’t critical of men and we let everything pass, without a word. Do you know why? Because the law is made by men, and when anything is done by a woman, a man has a law to control her, one written to punish her. If I were in charge, I would decree that all the unfaithful men carry a tree branch in their hands, and then we would see the entire city looking like a forest.”

“It sounds like a 21st-century writer wrote it,” Congdon says. “But I didn’t change a word.”

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Pearl Neiman   |2010-03-17 15:08:41 Nice. Reply 1   0

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