Georges Feydeau | The Farce Awakens Feydeau x 2: Going to Pot and Stark Naked / 2026

farce without curtains

by Douglas Messerli

 

Georges Feydeau The Farce Awakens Feydeau x 2: Going to Pot and Stark Naked / 2026, directed by Daniel Passer at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble / the performance I attended was a matinee on November 8, 2026

 

The popular French boulevard writer of farces, Georges Feydeau (1862-1921), created plays beloved by the French bourgeoisie, works which featured restrained and unpermitted sex, forcing his characters, often innocent and just as often guilty, to slide under beds, stuff themselves into closets, exit and enter quickly through various doors, or just run for the nearest cover as wives and lovers act out their various roles of shock and dismay.

     A good farce is a messy affair, but enacted with near perfect ensemble timing, each leap to escape, attempt to cover up and hide the fact that the individual is not behaving to the requirements of bourgeoise society must be skillfully carried out if it is to make us laugh.

     Moreover, as these two short works make clearer than ever, there was amazingly a element in the farces by Feydeau of the Belle Époque that previewed what would later become the absurdist values of Ionesco and to a certain degree even Beckett: the twists and turns of language, the misunderstanding of behavior, the incomprehensible actions of a disobedient wife—which occurs in each of these short works—and the true ridiculousness of what is being demanded of them by their societally proper husbands, all echo absurdist works that remain with us even through Joe Orton and Edward Albee. And yes, these works are sexist, but they also make us laugh at those very pretensions.

    In the first work, the husband, Chouilloux (Justin Blanchard) has little interest in the fact that his son hasn’t been able “to go,” his response, “Go where?” He is most distressed by the fact that his wife, Julie (Julie Mann) dares to bring in a washcan of dirty water into his study and, most importantly, that at late hours in the morning she is still indecently dressed in a house coat, with curlers in her hair, despite the fact that he has an appointment Fallovoine (Barry Del Sherman), a wealthy manufacturer who just might order up his unbreakable porcelain chamber pots which he hopes might be sold to the military, making him a fortune.

     Getting his wife dressed or even out of the room with washcan in hand is nearly impossible, and the appearance of the badly-behaved child (wonderfully portrayed by little person Kody Nelson, who takes a moment out to explain to the audience that he is not really an underage child, but a full adult playing a child, ironically commenting on our present overreactions of child representation in plays and movies) makes matters even worse.

    The porcelain pots do indeed easily break, the wife refuses to dress, and the “baby,” reminding us some of the bratty babies portrayed in early filmmaking, in particular, the very clever first talkie by the great French director Jean Renoir, Baby’s Laxative (1931)—which incidentally is based on this Feydeau short work, but presents us a much more elegant rendition—manages to make the men drink his laxative for him, resulting in obviously embarrassing events, including the still-improperly dressed wife’s final revelation that Mr. Fallovine’s wife is sleeping with his cousin.

     If I have already seemed to tell you too much of the plot here, you are missing the fact that it is not plot that is truly important in farce, it is the way the story occurs, the minutiae of events along the way that truly matter, including how well they are executed

     And this cast is superb in that execution, having timed everything down to the second so much so that at moments their language and behavior is simply dizzying. Particularly, in the far more interesting second short play, “Stark Naked,” Rachel Avery as Mme. Chouilloux, who in this case is not truly stark naked but wears only a tiny negligée that fully reveals her breasts and body contours (it is a hot day and she is simply not comfortable in full clothing) to every man she meets, including the eager servant Victor (Ryan Nebreja). In this work her politician husband (Blanchard) insists that she dresses properly before the arrival of his arch-enemy merchant who ran against him in the last election, Himmelfaar’s (Del Sherman) arrival, a name Chouilloux always ends with a “t.”

    Once more his demands have little effect. as his wife weaves a trail of illogical language and actions that finally ties him up in knots as he realizes, little by little, that his entire hopes to become the prime minister will go down the drain as she, stung by a wasp in the derriere demands to have it “sucked out,” first by her husband, then Himmelfaar, then Victor, and a “doctor” upstairs, who is not a real doctor but works in the Department of Medicine—reminding us, of course, of one of Trump’s nefarious appointments. Finally, when a reporter from Le Figaro arrives (played by Nelson, who again reminds the audience that he is not a real reporter but an actor portraying a reporter), he happily attempts to do what the others have resisted, and succeeds.

     Perceiving that his real arch-enemy has been watching the events from his apartment window across the way, Chouilloux abandons all his career ambitions in a truly unexpected manner.

    Once more, the cast is simply excellent, proving laughter and entertainment to the audience with their expert memory and precise movement of the complex machinations of the entire work.

   I too laughed and enjoyed both works immensely, as all audiences who attend this play will. But I still felt something was missing.

    As I expounded to my accompanying friend on our drive home, perhaps Passer, who formerly acted as a clown in the Cirque du Soleil’s Zarkana performance and before that in Franco Dragone’s La Rĕve is just not the right director for farce. His brief introduction relates his understanding of farce to be related to the Marx Brothers, Chaplin, Burns and Allen, and the sketches on Saturday Night Live and Monthy Python, a real misunderstanding, I believe, of works such as Feydeau’s

     Farce is not truly vaudeville, and surely not a comic sketch. In high farce, since it still represents the epitome of middle-class aspirations, the work nearly always performed on a curtained stage with utter seriousness, even with finesse. Despite all the running, chasing, and hiding delusions, farce retains a wall around itself as if it were the most serious theater possible. Decorum is demanded even if unobserved. As Feydeau himself wrote: “You have to place ordinary people in a dramatic situation and then observe them from a comic angle, but they must never be allowed to say or do anything which is not strictly demanded, first by their character and secondly by the plot." One could never stay that of comic figures and TV sketch artists where improv is so rewarded.

     In short, Feydeau using the stage to present us with a form of decorum with which the characters on stage seldom can never bring themselves to fully engage, never asks his actors to speak to their audiences as much as to engage with their audiences. This is bourgeois theater for the common man and woman.

     Passer often does just the opposite, his actors cruising the theater before and even while the plays begin and continue and attempting to engage with nervous audience members. During the time needed between the plays for a new set-up, he forces Nebreja and Nelson to do a virtual sideshow act of climbing up and down ladders. The association of bodily movements each time when the name of a guest in their houses (Fallovoine and Himmelfaar in particular) comes up quickly becomes distracting. These routines are funny only for a few seconds.

      What is worse is that Passer provides no source of the translations of these two short plays, so we have no idea how much was actually added or subtracted to the texts; just how Feydeau-ish are these two short Feydeau plays? If Renoir is to be believed, there are a great many changes.

      These are only personal reflections, however, and I strongly encourage audiences to hurry to these two exuberant farcical works. We do need more of such comedy these days in our lives, and this is where you will certainly find it. How often do we even get a Feydeau work performed these days?

     Moreover, almost everything that the Odyssey Theatre has presented over the last several decades has represented some of the finest in world theater in a city, despite many small innovative companies, that needs more attention and audience participation. I promise you an enjoyable afternoon or evening at The Farce Awakens Feydeau x 2 with a talented cast to be reckoned with.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2026

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance (November 2026).