Not by Bed Alone

When I am arranging all that madness that unleashes the spectators' glee. I am not amused by it. I keep the cool, calm pose of the chemist measuring out his medicine. I put into my pill a gram of imbroglio, a gram of licentiousness, a gram of observation. As well as I can, I grind them all into a powder. And I can tell, almost without fail, the effect that they will produce...When the work is done, what a relief! I regain my freedom. Georges Feydeau

His own protestations to the contrary, Georges Feydeau must have been at least mildly amused by the utter madness of his literary conceits. The words "Feydeau" and farce are so tightly entangled with each other that they are close to interchangeable. The brilliant implausibility of his plots and the sheer bravado of his artifice are so stunning that even their author could not have been somewhat affected by them. Whatever Hollywood, and the entire Twentieth Century for that matter, have done in the way of farce is largely traceable to the influence of this archpriest of the genre.

If Feydeau has not had the popularity he deserves among American audiences, it is largely because he is almost untranslatable. He is so uniquely French that he defies transferral into a less poetic language. Four Farces by Georges Feydeau, translated by Norman Shapiro, was a National Book Award finalist last year thanks to Shapiro's facility in rising to the challenge of Feydeau, and this production shows that Shapiro's translation makes a good acting text as well as a good reading version.

In adapting Feydeau, any translator has to take certain liberties. What Shapiro has done is to take liberties equal in inventiveness to the devices he is trying to translate: take, for instance. Miss Betting, the governess whom Feydeau uses to mock the garrulous Madamae Duverger. In the original. Miss Betting is English, unable to understand a word of Madame Duverger's rapid fire French. In this translation, she becomes a deafmute, capable of speaking only in sign language. The comic intent is preserved, even heightened, although the device itself is altered.

Feydeau's farces depend on so many devices, visual tricks, wordplays, multiple entrances and exits, that only a well-disciplined company can hope to make sense (or nonsense) of them. The High Tor Company does remarkably well at meeting the requirements of Feydeau. Jeffrey Peters as Bois-D'Enghien, the protagonist who loves too wisely and too much, carries himself like a sophisticated Groucho Marx. Rocco Piccolomini as the General is a fine old fashioned zany with a phony moustache and a phony accent to match, both of which contribute immeasurably to his persona, as he and the posturing poetaster Bouzin (Michael Baird) flutter like moths around the corona of the coquette, Lucette (Elsie Adams).

The High Tor theatre is the rarest of birds, a community theatre which involves the community in which it is located. Most of the actors, actresses and staff come from the Fitchburg area, and bring considerable amounts of energy to their eight play summer season. This little outpost of theatre in a small town well removed from the city may not be of Broadway quality but these days neither is Broadway. The rebuilt barn which houses the playhouse imposes a number of restrictions on any production, but the feeling of theatre being done for some intangible reason, for something other than Actors' Equity scale plus fringes, covers a multitude of sins. The small theatre limits provide intimacy at the expense of narrowing the scope of the production. Still, the American premiere of a new version of Feydeau could have happened in worse places than a sturdy old New England barn.