Matching wits with Oscar Wilde takes chutzpah. Yet in “Bunbury,” playwright Tom Jacobson has done just that. His stylish if dizzying romp, now at Diversionary Theatre, will amuse and provoke theater lovers who may also be left pondering that always-fraught relationship between art and life.
At the outset, Jacobson goes even Tom Stoppard one better. Two-bit players in “Hamlet” got their own Stoppard spinoff in the English playwright's breakthrough “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.” Jacobson gives a whole gaudy parade of never-appearing characters their crack at changing literary and real history.
DATEBOOK
"Bunbury"
7:30 p.m.Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays, through June 17 with an added 7:30 p.m. June 4 performance
Diversionary Theatre, 4545 Park Blvd., University Heights
$27-29; (619) 220-0097 or www.diversionary.org
|
Jacobson's hero is Bunbury, the imaginary friend of Algernon Moncrieff, himself one of two silly male characters pursuing two even sillier upper-class girls in Wilde's great comedy, “The Importance of Being Earnest.”
Whenever Algernon wants to get away from the city, he disappears to go Bunburying. A mere plot device in Wilde, Jacobson give him a starring role in his rambunctious 2005 comedy. And at Diversionary, where director Esther Emery has staged a smart, lively and well-cast production, actor David McBean looks born to play the part of the lily-wielding, poetry-loving aesthete pining away for love of liter-ah-ture and Algernon.
After fiercely trading epigrams with his surprisingly shrewd, piano-playing butler Hartley (Tom Zohar), Bunbury gets visited by a singularly unhappy Renaissance lady, the ditched girlfriend of Romeo, Rosaline (Melissa Fernandes, spot-on too).
Like Bunbury in “Earnest,” she's never seen in Shakespeare's play; she's “subfictional.” Others who make unprecedented appearances on stage – the young, gay husband of Blanche (“rely on the kindness of strangers”) DuBois; the “little bugger” son of “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and, of course, Beckett's heretofore unseen Godot.
Such an erudite and well-written conceit does not a play make, however. So Jacobson, an L.A. playwright beloved by many critics in his hometown, does more. He sends Bunbury and Rosaline racing through dramatic literature to change the unhappy endings of iconic works. Juliet wakes up in the tomb and, to Rosaline's disgust, reunites with Romeo. Blanche forgives her wayward husband and thus avoids “that Polish rapist” Stanley Kowalski.
Best of all, in Chekhov's “Three Sisters” – well, perhaps it's better not to give any more away.
What lends the comedy its occasional heft, however, are two other themes. Jacobson teases out the gay subtexts in Wilde's comedy and Tennessee Williams' drama, while giving Bunbury and old Algernon a happy (read, sweetly sublimated) ending. He makes you wonder: If every writer were free and fulfilled, would there be any literature at all? Would happy endings migrate to life?
Director Emery pulls well-timed performances from everyone in her energetic cast, with designer Nick Fouch's sliding curtains and period props switching eras swiftly enough to keep the proceedings this side of anarchic.
Wendy Waddell and John Rosen are especially good in multiple roles and Aaron Marcotte stretches smoothly from high comedy as Algernon to low as a Southern gay pickup flung loose from “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
The show belongs to McBean and Fernandes though, and they play off one another, his likably wounded aesthete to her versifying, vilifying shrew, with the deceptive ease of real pros. This warm-hearted, light-headed “Bunbury” concludes a nicely varied and adventurous 2006-07 season at Diversionary.
Playwright: Tom Jacobson. Director: Esther Emery. Set: Nick Fouch. Lighting: Christian DeAngelis. Costumes: Jennifer Brawn Gittings. Props: Amy Chini. Sound: Kristal Ip. Cast: David McBean, Tom Zohar, Melissa Fernandes, Chris Buess, Aaron Marcotte, Wendy Waddell, John Rosen, Diane Addis, Craig Huisenga.
Anne Marie Welsh: (619) 293-1265; anne-marie.welsh@uniontrib.com.
