Theatre production lacking in laughs

You can't judge a book by its cover, and you can't judge a play by its set. "A Flea in Her Ear" offers up a fantastic set and a plot that falls flat.

Arizona Repertory Theater is performing "A Flea in Her Ear," a French play written by Georges Feydeau in 1907, now through Dec. 2 in the University of Arizona's comfortable Repertory Theatre.

While the play takes two and a half hours to unfold with two 10-minute intermissions and tends to be fairly tedious, the set design won't fail to impress.

The stage comes complete with a revolving wall, two kinds of wallpaper and faux period furniture. At the very least, the anticipation of set changes makes waiting outside the theater for 10 minutes and paying too much for bad lobby coffee they won't let you bring back with you worthwhile.

"Flea" takes its cast of characters through a series of misunderstandings and mistaken identities. In order to trap her blamelessly square husband in an imagined affair, a woman has her friend write him a phony love letter. The letter, from an "unknown lady," asks the husband to meet her at the ill-famed Pussycat Hotel. All the wrong people run into each other in all the wrong places, and every character gets mixed up trying to maintain a virtuous stance.

The theater arts department chose the play as a means of teaching acting students how to portray the style of an era.

"You notice things when you watch the play, like the way the women handle their hats and purses," said the play's director Chris Wilkins. "All of those things have to be studied and learned in order for the play to stay true to an era."

Although the play does offer the opportunity to study era and the actors carry it off well, a wittier play could have facilitated the lesson better.

Like the set, the costumes are well-made and convincing. Every character looks the part and, for the most part, acts the part too - although they seem to lack nuance. The actors tend to deliver all their lines with the same inflection, and a character whose defining characteristic is a speech impediment keeps losing his impediment.

"One of the first articles I came across while doing research for the play said that comedy is the most difficult thing," Wilkins said. "If comedy is hard, then this kind of farce must be harder. All of the actors have to be on time, and they have to learn that suffering is funny. The more these people suffer the funnier it is."

The actors bravely take on the challenge of funniness, although the way the plot keeps unwinding ends up being only frustrating. The audience, as well as the characters, is indeed made to understand suffering.

"It's wickedly funny," said production stage manager Dana Nestrick. "It'll be the fastest two and a half hours of your life. It keeps the audience constantly on its toes."

Maybe it's not the fastest two and a half hours, but at least the theater chairs are comfortable. The play easily could have been cut short after the second intermission, and the wrap-up seems like a chore.

The play, which was considered too risquŽ to be shown in regular theaters when it was written, has been adapted to stage a number of times over the course of the last century,

"People have done different things, like reset the play in San Francisco's Haight and Ashberry," Wilkins said, "but we decided that we wanted to revisit the kind of Boulevard Theater it was originally played in."

The cast manages to throw in an innuendo or two of their own by gesticulating wildly all over the set. It's not the most intellectual way of getting laughs, but suggestively stroking a phonograph sure can keep a college audience going.

The play runs tonight and tomorrow night, Tuesday through Nov. 17, and Nov.29 through Dec.2. Shows start at 7:30 p.m., with 2 p.m. matinees scheduled for this Sunday, Nov. 18 and Dec.2.