"The Explorers Club" at Manhattan City Center
It is difficult to say whether
playwright Nell Benjamin has, in “The Explorers Club,” written a feminist farce
or a masculine one.
Early news
of the Manhattan Theater Club-produced play led some (myself included) to believe that the play would be social
commentary on the inclusion of women in historically male societies such as The
Explorers Club, which women are not permitted to join. The play is set in 1879, and the venerable
institution must make an earth-shattering decision—whether or not to admit a
female explorer, Phyllida Spotte-Hume (Jennifer Westfeldt with an excellent
British accent), who has discovered a lost city. There would be room here for Ms. Benjamin to
write a rather boring play with a lot of heart about the equality of women in
every sense with perhaps two or three jokes thrown in to lighten the tension.
But
thankfully, she has not. That “The
Explorers Club” has very little heart is not detrimental, because it’s written
in the style of a classic farce, and “little heart” is practically a
requirement to qualify in that category.
The show starts off pleasantly funny and ends uproarious, as many farces
do. It’s quite a relief to witness a
comedy with no deep and probing intentions.
The ardent feminism is absent
too. Of the nine-person cast (playing
eleven characters), eight actors are male, and Ms. Spott-Hume’s appearances are
actually few and far between. In much of
her longest period spent on stage, she is unconscious, having fainted out of
fright. Here is where Ms. Benjamin
abandons the pretext of a play about women banging on the doors that have been
closed to them and welcomes, with open arms, a comedy about fussy British men
and the funny things they say. Who
doesn’t love a play like that?
Lucius Fretway (Lorenzo Pisoni),
the loud, fidgety botanist who puts Phyllida up for membership, doesn’t seem to
have much interest in her achievements (though he professes otherwise), but
rather in her affections. Harry Percy (a
delightfully insensitive David Furr), the president of the club, who has just
returned from discovering the “East Pole”, has little to say about a woman’s
role in 1870s London and far more about the game of winning Phyllida before
Lucius can. (He's also the focus of a brilliant and unexpected Gilbert and Sullivan reference--one of the many pleasant surprises this show has to offer.) Various other professors,
all very funny, wander in and out from time to time with snakes, guinea pigs,
and assorted comic devices, each more welcome than the last.
Phyllida brings back a “savage” (Carson
Elrod) from her lost city whose unpronounceable name she has shortened to
Luigi. Luigi’s people say hello by
slapping you in the face, and Phyllida is in deep trouble when Luigi says hello
to the Queen of England. Sir Bernard
Humphries (Max Baker), the queen's personal secretary, wants Phyllida to give up Luigi and a map to the lost
city so that England
may declare war on them, but Phyllida refuses and, after Luigi saves the lives
of two of the explorers, the club is no less willing. So Luigi is disguised as the club’s absent
bartender, Roger. A great deal of
slapstick, enacted with a great deal of agility and talent, springs from
Luigi’s unique style of tending bar.
Eventually (and I don’t think this is giving too much away), all ends
well.
Watching a farce is always
refreshing, and leaving “The Explorers Club” one feels the aftereffects of a
palette cleanse of laughter. Some jokes
are somewhat predictable (a lot of “If such-and-such walked through that door…”
followed by such-and-such walking through that door), but they are all the more
entertaining for it. In an era of
intense theater, it is even somewhat relaxing to experience this spirited work
of Ms. Benjamin and her cast, in which there is so little on the line.
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