Unnecessary Farce: A Comedy
When I attended North Coast Rep’s Birthday Candles, artistic director David Ellenstein said during his opening remarks that when he sees movies, he tends to think first of the director, but when he sees plays, the actor is king. I get what he was getting at. When I was reviewing movies for the Reader, I tended to give my first thoughts to the director as well. He's the one who has to think about the lights, the camera, the action... But when it comes to theater, you can’t top the actor’s on-stage, right-there immediacy.
And yet: when I started reviewing plays, I found myself thinking first of the writer — again, without thinking about it. What of the poor actors? For that matter, what of the good ones? (I say, I say, that’s a joke, son.) Perhaps the trouble is that I’m spoiled; San Diego is a good theater town, which means that it’s able to attract the sort of critical mass of acting talent required to put on good shows. Perhaps it’s that I’m a scribbler myself, and so more conscious of the writer's art (or artlessness) on display. Whatever the reason, I’m sorry, actors. It’s not that I’m not grateful. With any luck, I’ll manage to do better in the future.
But even in my present state, there are some shows that don’t so much show off an actor’s talents as they rest on his shoulders. Unnecessary Farce is such a show. It’s not that there’s nothing else worthwhile going on in Paul Slade Smith’s exercise in cops-and-robbers crazytimes. (And I do mean exercise: the play is chock full of running about, dressing, undressing, jumping on and off of beds, and cartoonish knockouts. It gets a bit exhausting toward the end, but that’s not because the players are themselves exhausted.) For one thing, Smith’s powers of invention are mostly up to the challenge of putting his characters through a myriad of dangerous situations without ever causing the audience a moment of genuine anxiety. (The setup: two bumbling cops have recruited the mayor’s new accountant to assist them in an undercover sting operation in a hotel room, but things get complicated by the arrival of various criminal elements. Each hotel room has an entrance door, a closet door, and a bathroom door, and there’s a double door between the rooms. All of them should be worn off their hinges by the time the show closes on Sunday.) For another, all of the performers acquit themselves admirably — I especially admired Melanie Mino’s embarrassed accountant and Robin Thompson’s qualmy crook.
But Unnecessary Farce lives or dies by Todd, his terrible temper, and his terrific Scottish accent — the one that gets thicker as he gets more and more upset. (“Terrific” here is used in both senses: “having great intensity,” and the more archaic “causing terror.”) You have to be taken with Todd if you’re even going to play along with the show’s essential silliness, let alone enjoy it. And I was taken with Nick Siljander’s Todd. There’s a great, open sincerity to Siljander — I first noticed it in Coronado Playhouse’s recent production of Curtains — as if he doesn’t know he’s acting. Though of course, I suspect otherwise. And when playwright Smith’s madcap antics started to lose steam in Act II, Todd started to gain it, to great effect. Hooray for actors!
When
Ongoing until Sunday, June 15, 2025
Hours
| Sundays, 2pm-4pm |
| Fridays, 7:30pm-9:30pm |
| Saturdays, 7:30pm-9:30pm |