Theater Review: Boeing-Boeing at Trinity Rep
Friday, April 20, 2012
"Whose bag is this?" Things heat up between Stephen Thorne and Rebecca Gibel in Boeing-Boeing. Photo: Mark Turek.
What keeps a multi-ton airplane aloft is what keeps the theatrical machinery of Boeing-Boeing, a French farce that revolves around 1960s jet travel, equally airborne. It’s all about speed, and Trinity Rep’s production of Marc Camoletti’s 1962 play moves fast enough to both maximize the fun of farce and minimize our ability to focus on the creakiness of the seriously-dated plotline.
The set-up shows its age, much like an episode of Love, American Style does in a post-HBO world: Bernard (Joe Wilson, Jr.), an American architect living in Paris, keeps three mistresses--all of them stewardesses--literally in the air, managing his polygamous lifestyle by adroit use of their air travel timetable. The three gals come and go from his flat (in Trinity’s production, a blue and white confection by Patrick Lynch that evokes the color scheme of Pan-Am Airlines) as regularly as their jets come and go from Orly Airport.
Timetable tricks
Bernard’s deception works (none of the women knows about the others) because, as he explains to a visiting school chum Robert (Stephen Thorne), he utilizes the precision of the timetable to keep them apart. It’s math, it’s geometry, and with a little help from an existentially depressed French maid named Bertha (Nance Williamson) who keeps the domestic details in place (each stewardess has favorite foods as well as her own decor), it’s a space-age algebra of love. Like sexy electrons circling their Lotharian nucleus, these flight attendants should never collide.
From pillbox to pumps
And frankly, there’s considerable enjoyment. Visually, it’s perfect fun: each stewardess is outfitted by William Lane from pillbox to pumps in TWA red, Alitalia blue, and Lufthansa yellow, and each actor (Rebecca Gibel as Gloria, Liz Morgan as Gabriella, and Amanda Dolan as Gretchen) makes the most of her tight-fitting jacket and pencil skirt to strut, straddle, and seduce.
As the calculating Bernard who falls prey to his own deceptions, Joe Wilson, Jr., brings a playboy sheen to the role that suits a farcical anti-hero. Williamson as the grumpy maid doesn’t make the most of her comedic position at the center of the action and is the one actor in this production that slows the pace when she’s driving the scene (her guttural French accent that keeps creeping into German doesn’t help, and one can only dream of how Christine Baranski mined this material in the 2008 revival on Broadway).
Stephen Thorne's manic gifts
But the man flying the plane (aside from director Sullivan, who in fact casts himself as a boozy, chain-smoking pilot in a hilarious pre-show airline safety film), is the wonderful Stephen Thorne, let loose to play on every edge of the play’s mechanics. Part Jimmy Stewart, part Sean Hayes, and just bit of David Byrne, Thorne takes full advantage of his earnest good looks, his vocal range from soothing midwestern tones to high-pitched imitations of an offstage stewardess, and his loose-limbed, manic gift for comedy. As the plot’s screws tightens on Bernard and Robert, Thorne’s comedy just gets crazier and sharper. And in the play’s concluding mini-dance number that bridges to curtain call, his 60s gogo performance is reason enough to buy a ticket.
So, like any happy passenger at 30,000 feet, sit back and let Boeing-Boeing do the flying. You’ll be there before you know it.
Boeing-Boeing, through May 13 at Trinity Repertory, 201 Washington Street, Providence, 401-351-4242, www.trinityrep.com.
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