STAGE REVIEW : 3-Ring Romp, Thumbing Its ‘Red Noses’ at Everything

Are you ready for a comedy about the Black Plague?

A comedy where lepers die laughing, where nuns hang their laundry from the true cross, where blind men juggle, where cripples throw down their crutches and dance--badly?

A comedy where all this has some point?

We are discussing Peter Barnes’ “Red Noses,” which opened Wednesday night at the San Diego Repertory Theatre. It is a wonderful play. It didn’t seem so in its American premiere last fall at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago, but that was because the Goodman couldn’t heft it.

Understandably. Even the Royal Shakespeare Company was stumped when Barnes sent them the play, then called “Red Noses, Black Death,” in 1980. Oh, dear--couldn’t we do this next season? (They finally did it in ’85.) It is a pageant play, a carnival, a black comedy, a spoof and a play of ideas. With songs, of course. Everything from plainchant to “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries.”

It occurred to the San Diego Rep and the Dell’ Arte Players that there was enough play here for two theaters. This was inspiration. The Dell’ Arte troupe doesn’t have to work up the circus skills that the show calls for: tumbling, juggling, mime and, especially, clowning. They’ve been at it for 15 years.

It’s not likely that the show has ever had the physical sureness that we saw on the Rep’s stage Wednesday night. When Father Flote (Michael Fields) and his zanies start snatching balls out of the air, it’s the real thing.

But don’t think that the Dell’ Arte people take care of the circus stuff, and then stand back while the Rep people do the play. In this show, you can’t tell the clowns from the actors. Everybody is out there knocking them dead for the Lord--and being knocked dead. One has heard of people being martyred upside down. But--standing on their heads?

It’s a strange, strange play. But there again it fits the Dell’ Arte mind-set, which has always been a little kinky. The Black Death wouldn’t necessarily strike them as an out-of-the-way topic for a comedy at all.

Let’s be clear at this point: Barnes isn’t “making fun” of the Black Plague, as a Monty Python movie might. Nor does he mean it as a metaphor for our plague, the AIDS crisis. (Who had even heard of AIDS in 1980?)

Rather, Barnes is trying to say something important, and hard to say, about laughter: how it can keep us sane in one kind of crisis and play us false in another.

Father Flote gets permission from the ultra-cynical Pope Clement VI (Ollie Nash) to tour Christendom with a show that will distract the faithful from the fact that people are going to bed healthy and waking up dead--and the fact that the Church and State (same organism) don’t have a clue as to what to do about it.

To cover all bases, His Holiness has also sent out a group of professional flagellants, captained here by the barrel-bellied Bill Dunnam. Repent! Repent! (Co-directors Jael Weisman and Sam Woodhouse remind us that contrition also has its shtick.)

The two companies give us Barnes’ central question: Does God want us to feel awful about being human--and therefore in a mood to punish others for being the same--or are we to look on our fellow stumblebums with the amused tolerance that we would give Father Flote and his All Thumbs Theater Company?

A second question comes up when the Plague lifts, and His Holiness purges all free-lance entertainment. Father Flote realizes that his humor has coddled the powers-that-be: that his shows should have been tougher. But because their humor has been subversive all along (as in an “Everyman” where the hero outsmarts the Devil on his own ), we don’t understand what he’s talking about.

The production isn’t especially well-spoken either--oh, those breathy American voices in lines designed to cut! But the bodies are there, and the willingness to go over the top, and these are the basic needs in “Red Noses.” The design is over the top, too, especially Nancy Jo Smith’s costumes--the very latest in pestilential chic.

Composer Gina Leishman also deserves special mention for a score that can evoke Chartres Cathedral in one breath and the Catalina pier in the next. “Red Noses” is not to be sneezed at. It’s as funny as a crutch.

Plays Tuesdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 and 7 p.m. Closes Sept. 3. Tickets $13-$20. 79 Horton Plaza, San Diego. (619) 235-8025.