More than 30 years into his career as writer, stand-up comedian and actor, Steve Martin remains a very funny man. His adaptation of The Underpants, Carl Sternheim’s 1910 German farce, offers plentiful evidence, and the new Actors Bridge production, inaugurating the company’s 10th season, is nothing less than a splendid realization of Martin’s impish wit and affection for giddy wordplay.
The big triumph here belongs to director Don Griffiths, who has gathered an appealing cast of seven and set them loose to roam over a marvelous period set, which he also designed. Kate Foreman’s colorful costumes also add to the scenery, and in this atmosphere of professional gloss, the actors work the long one-act’s five extended scenes with rightfully overblown joy.
The original Sternheim scenario is pure silliness, and hence a natural to attract Martin, who infuses the text with naughty puns, sly references to things close to his heart (banjos, for one) and droll, absurdist takes on sexual politics. Madcap events are set into motion after housewife Louise (Holly Allen) drops her panties during the king’s public procession. This inadvertent act suddenly draws admirers who long to inveigle their way into her household, which is commandeered by her sexist, boorish and unimaginative bureaucrat-husband Theo (Matthew Carlton). When a poet (Zak Risinger) and a barber (Josh Childs) seek to move in as boarders, Louise’s initial shock is suddenly trumped by their flattery.
The performances throughout are uniformly playful, with Allen leading the way with her deft blend of winsome naïveté and womanly desire. Risinger gets good mileage out of his fanciful, over-the-top declarations on passion, and Rachel Agee is also very good as the devilishly inquisitive upstairs neighbor who lives vicariously through Louise.
But best of all is the veteran Carlton, who manages to wring a cockeyed charm out of clearly unlikable pomposity. His Theo makes suspicious comments about Jews, whistles themes from Wagner as he goes about Teutonically toting up his money, and delivers narrow-minded Old World speeches about the nature of manhood, doing it all with glib credibility and an artful sense of how his essentially humorless character serves as a comic straight man.
On the heels of last season’s delightful Kimberly Akimbo, Actors Bridge once again exhibits a happy company bent for sophisticated contemporary comedy. The Underpants is smart, frothy fun pitched to a wide audience, and Martin’s engaging literary sensibilities guarantee reliable entertainment.
Existential absurdity at Bongo After Hours
Underwear obsession is apparently the theatrical order of the day in Nashville, as the new original play at Bongo After Hours Theatre concerns a panty fetishist forced to confront the horrors of existentialism. Local playwright-actor Nate Eppler is currently performing at Chaffin’s Barn Dinner Theatre in a light “couples comedy,” but his Mister Greenjeans script is a far cry from middlebrow fare. Eppler has nominally adapted Kobo Abe’s 1974 play The Green Stockings, but in fact his version is more about the somewhat false presumptions he made about Kobo’s drama before reading it.
At any rate, we get a suicidal panty fetishist—played with nervous intensity by Michael Roark—who undergoes a bizarre experiment and emerges with the stomach of a cow, thus “freeing” him to subsist on readily available vegetation. Being an herbivore has its own challenges, however, and after entering a world of foghorn gastric sounds, our hero faces the bleak realization that life can be a miserable escape from death just as surely as death is a happy escape from life.
Eppler peppers his protagonist’s journey with self-conscious dialogue, multiple potential endings and reality-vs.-fantasy scenarios, with his play’s sometimes inscrutable messages carried primarily by the doctor figure, acted coyly by Eric Strahan. The playwright also interrupts the proceedings with a sidebar visitation to the plot of The Incredible Hulk comic book No. 130, concerning regular guy Bruce Banner’s technically impossible confrontation with his mean, green alter-ego. Brandon Reece delivers this meditation with sincerity and with an eye toward linking it to the play’s rumination on identity.
Julia Hinson directs with breathless pacing, which serves two critical, contradictory functions: the lengthy one-act moves fluidly and nimbly, yet Eppler’s complex ideas hit the air so quickly we hardly have time to absorb them. Amidst Jay Stinson’s rudimentary set design, with the theater strewn with clotheslines of dangling undergarments, we’re effectively drawn into the author’s vision of madness. While we may not emerge with a completely coherent understanding, we know that Eppler has assaulted us with some interesting and unsettling, if scattershot, ideas about life.
The play runs through Feb. 25.
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