Black Marks

This afternoon, I traveled a bit up the mountain to Evergreen to watch the Evergreen Players present the play Black Comedy. It's a one act British farce written by Peter Shaffer (a playwright normally known for intensely dramatic material such as Equus and Amadeus). It's also a play that I performed years ago in college. I'd never actually seen it myself, but I recall it being perhaps my favorite play (and favorite role) I ever got to perform. I was eager to see this staging.

Black Comedy is still an amazingly funny script. The premise has a starving artist trying to impress both his girlfriend's father and a wealthy art buyer all on one night, having furnished his apartment for the occasion with fancy furniture stolen from his vacationing neighbor. But a power outage occurs, setting into motion a spiraling chain of calamity in true farcical fashion.

The particular gem at the heart of the play is a theatrical conceit: when the lights are on full on the stage, that's when the characters all behave as though they're in the pitch blackness of the power outage. As people stumble around in comical near misses, we get to see it all while the performers act as though blind.

It's a particularly challenging piece to perform. There's the British accent to master. Then there's the physicality of pretending to be blinded by darkness. And for the central character (whom I was fortunate to play), there's the juggling of several key agendas -- keeping the girlfriend happy, sucking up to the father, returning the neighbor's stolen furniture (in the dark!) when he returns from vacation early, and keeping a jealous ex-girlfriend at bay when she too decides to crash the party.

Frankly, it's too much for most actors to handle. Watching the play this afternoon, I got the distinct impression that I myself was probably lucky to have been half as good as I might have once imagined myself to be in my own mind. The play is so rich, so densely loaded with jokes, and so demanding of swift timing, that you can easily find 100 moments for big laughs, yet leave another 100 unmined.

I enjoyed the Evergreen Players production immensely. It definitely serves up plenty of laughs, and is well worth going to see. But I also felt the pace slacken in several key moments. Some of the cues were a bit loose, leaving a few performers awkwardly stifling a logical character response until the appropriate moment for their line came along. That said, the cast as a whole was quite strong with the physical comedy, serving up many hilarious near-collisions and other humorous moments.

Particularly strong in the cast were Carol Meredith as the unhinged drunk Miss Furnival, and Andrea Rabold as spurned (and thus sinister) ex-girlfriend Clea. JR Cody Schuyler is also quite good as Brindsley -- his character work is developed, and his physical comedy sharp (though his accent is a bit spotty).

The show has one more weekend coming up, and I suspect seats that can still be filled. If you live in the Denver area, would like a reasonably priced night at the theater, and love to laugh, I would definitely recommend the production.