Happenstance Theater traps five pretentious aristocrats in a comedy of bad manners that could use more luster and more bite.
Playing parlor games, dancing the minuet, making snide comments — aristocrats sure do know how to party. But there’s always a chance that by the end of the night someone will lose their head …
The dandies and dauphins of the 1 percent prance to 59E59 Theaters for Happenstance Theater’s “Barococo,” A satire of upper-class privilege zhuzhed up into an often absurd comedy of manners, “Barococo” has fun and laughs, but doesn’t always have the glamour you’d expect from this exaggerated snapshot of genteel life.
The play’s title is a portmanteau of “Baroque” and “Rococo,” the 17th- and 18th-century periods of ornate European art, fashion, architecture and music. “Barococo” takes place during a soiree hosted by the noble Dauphine Marionette (Sarah Olmsted Thomas). In attendance are the self-important actor Astorio Cavalieri (Mark Jaster), the pretentious Duc Leslie Pamplemousse de Citron-Pressé (Alex Vernon), the petty elder Countess Olympia Stroganovskaya (Sabrina Selma Mandell) and the vacuous outsider Baroness Constance Blandford Plainview (Gwen Grastorf).
Luccio Patatino von Dusselkopf (Caleb Jaster) serves as the entertainment, accompanying the party games with the sounds of Handel and Bach on harpsichord and cello.
Happenstance, a Washington-based physical theater troupe, devises productions with its cast, and there’s no plot to speak of in this brief 65-minute show, directed by the company members Jaster and Mandell.
We simply watch these daft noblemen and women play charades, dance and trade riddles in a desperate attempt to stave off ennui. Leisure is a trap — literally. It soon becomes clear that these aristocrats are unable to leave the party.
So the surprise of “Barococo” is how it actually resembles Sartre’s “No Exit,” or, more fittingly, Luis Buñuel’s surrealist film “The Exterminating Angel,” which was recently adapted into an opera. There’s the same idiocy and, sometimes, cruelty beneath the fawning and posturing. Somewhere outside this room is the real world, where finery and foppishness won’t save these characters from an uprising of the plebs.
The actors distinguish themselves through affectations: a raised eyebrow, a bow, a giggle, a swept leg, a daintily dropped handkerchief, a cleared throat. Pantomime and awkward silences are emphasized more than dialogue, and to great comedic effect — the show really takes off during an extended silent sequence in which the partygoers gorge on an unseen feast; outrageous feats of physical comedy soon devolve into violence and then total chaos.
As the Dauphine and Cavalieri, Thomas and Jaster make starving for attention into a show of flamboyance — she tittering shamelessly and he performing a full actor’s warm-up for a simple game of charades. Grastorf is a worthy straight woman, her bearings painfully stiff and face twisted into an expression of constant bafflement.
And yet, for a show all about excess, the production is oddly spare. The set design is virtually nonexistent — unadorned floors and walls dotted with a harpsichord, some stringed instruments, a fencing sword mount and a table with quills and an inkwell. In a program note the directors write that they chose this minimalist approach “to focus on period restraint, manners and style,” but the empty space feels like too stark of a contrast; some embellishments would do the production good.
The same can be said of Daniel Weissglass’s austere lighting and the costumes, designed by Mandell. The cuffs and collars and doublets, and curled and powdered wigs, are perfectly serviceable but could use more rococo ornamentation, with brighter colors, opulent fabrics and jewels.
The script itself could use some trimmings, too. There is plenty of delicious humor to chew on at “Barococo.” But more context on the outside world, and the lives of these characters, might individualize the gossip and quibbles, and give the satire more bite. Right now the show is little more than rich people dawdling and preening on a stage.
Barococo
Through March 6 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
