Time Flies

Small company gets big laughs with collection of one-acts

By Mark Collins, Camera Theater Critic
May 27, 2005

LAFAYETTE — The Lafayette Community Players is the most unpretentious theater company in the area. In LCP's current show, "Time Flies" — a collection of short one-act plays by humorist David Ives — actors pitch in and change set pieces between plays at the humble, 75-seat Mary Miller Theater. At last Saturday's sold-out show, artistic director Madge Montgomery helped direct audience traffic, and backstage personnel communicated via hand signals with the person running the sound and light board at the back of the audience.

But don't mistake the theater company's modest trappings for a lack of quality. Among the six short plays on the bill is "The Universal Language." I haven't seen such a well-acted and -directed 20 minutes of comic theater on any stage in two years.

There are four directors and 21 actors in the six short plays in LCP's "Time Flies." The plays include "Mere Mortals," "Words, Words, Words," "Soap Opera," "The Universal Language," "Sure Thing" and "The Mystery at Twicknam Vicarage."

Montgomery directs "The Universal Language," the story of a pathologically shy woman, Dawn (Sally Nell Clodfelter), and a con man, Don (Patrick Collins), who's selling language classes for a bogus tongue called Unamunda.

The invented language sounds like a mishmash of English, Latin and German, with a delightful dose of syllabic silliness thrown in. When Dawn ventures into Don's classroom, she's a nervous wreck. Twenty hilarious minutes later, Don's charade has been uncovered, but nevertheless, Dawn has overcome a speech impediment and is speaking Unamunda fluently.

Clodfelter is brilliant as the traumatized soul whose mouse-like voice quivers whenever she speaks. When she's not speaking, the quiver finds its way to her hands or her legs. Collins is a perfect comic foil as the overly animated swindler promoting the goofy language.

The two actors' performances are a study in good comic acting.

Often, actors become too conscious of their characters' comic antics and end up ruining the true laughs. It's as if the actor is stepping outside the performance and winking at the audience, commenting, "Look, isn't this funny?"

But "The Universal Language" works so well because Clodfelter and Collins create believable characters concerned only with what they think are very serious circumstances. So dedicated are they to the seriousness of their situations that they go to absurd lengths to get what they want, with hilarious results.

The results of the rest of "Time Flies" are a bit uneven, but, overall, it's an entertaining 21/2 hours of theater. Ives' humor often comes from contrasting high-minded ideas with low-minded silliness, and he is always wonderfully playful with language.

Four of LCP's one-acts come from the playwright's collection "All in the Timing," including "Words, Words, Words" and "Sure Thing." Linda Orr directs both with mixed results.

"Words, Words, Words" is based on the idea that "three monkeys typing into infinity will eventually produce Hamlet." Three chimps, named for three writers — Kafka (Beth Davis), Swift (Maureen Hines) and Milton (Lindsay Hudson Kourkoulos) — bang away at typewriters, perform ape-like antics for an unseen lab scientist and discuss their lot in life. The play's humor comes from the fact these are three brilliant minds, and yet they're monkeys. But LCP's cast plays the chimps on the low side of the learning curve. When one chimp mispronounces the word onomatopoeia, it's unclear if the actress doesn't know the word, or if she thinks her character doesn't know it. Either choice is misguided. Dumbing down the monkeys dulls the comic contrast and drains the humor out of the story.

"Sure Thing," meanwhile, is a hoot. It's a scene between a man (Marc R. Barr) and a woman (Rachel Beth Blaha) who encounter each other at a coffee shop late one evening. Barr and Blaha are strong in the two deceptively difficult roles.

In the play, Ives deconstructs the casual interactions between strangers of the opposite sex looking for love. Each time the conversation heads down the wrong road (sometimes, after a single word), a bell rings offstage and the actors start over again. Eventually, the couple, who meet when the man asks if the seat next to the woman is taken or not, end up a sure thing. But, in 15 clever minutes, Ives uncovers months' worth of dating minefields.

Among the other standout performances in the evening of one-acts, which plays through June 4, are Ray Viggiano as a deluded Jersey construction worker who thinks he's the Lindbergh baby in "Mere Mortals," and Gil Shalit as an uptight French maitre de in "Soap Opera," a story about a washing machine repairman's love affair with a washing machine.

However, all of the 21 actors who make their way onto the stage throughout the evening appear to be having fun, and that spirit translates to the audience during "Time Flies." The show is good for more than a few laughs.

Contact Camera Theater Critic Mark Collins at (303) 473-1369 or dailycamera.com.