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, Fallovoine (Barry Del Sherman) 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 with Choullioux (Justin Blanchard), 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. Chouilloux’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 Clarisse, 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 Ventroux 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, Ventroux 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 (Chouilloux 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).
