Stage : ‘Wedding’ a Farce Worthy of Brecht

Bertolt Brecht’s 1926 one-act farce, “The Wedding” is not about a wedding. It’s about a wedding supper and, more specifically, about the nine petits bourgeois partaking of it.

When it was published 40 years after its appearance on stage, the play, which opened over the week-end at Taper, Too in Hollywood, was actually renamed “The Petit-Bourgeois Wedding.” Petits bourgeois , or kleinburgers , were the backbone of the upwardly mobile, grotesquely self-important lower middle-class Brecht wanted to shoot down. The term, as derogatory as nouveaux-riches, was a way of characterizing the absurd pretensions of the group.

So don’t be put off by the crude and broadly physical way in which “The Wedding” starts. Those revolting stories of dinners past, vulgarly told by the bride’s tasteless father (Shelly DeSai) at this dreary gathering of family and friends, take a while to get funny--too long by half for a fast-track American crowd. But be patient. It has its rewards. Czech director Vladimir Strnisko does deliver.

In its early scenes, this new English-language adaptation by Strnisko, with Michael Henry Heim (it’s more than translation) strains for its comedy as clumsily as Alexander Buravsky’s “The Russian Teacher” currently at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa. And for the same reasons: a gulf in cultural sensibility augmented, in the case of “The Wedding,” by a generational gap in humor. It’s been 65 years after all. Brecht wrote “The Wedding” at 28, just two years before letting it rip with “The Threepenny Opera.”

His characters in “The Wedding” are generic, confirming Brecht’s intention to broadside a whole class of people. The Bride (O-Lan Jones) is pregnant. Her Groom (Chris Karchmar)--cloyingly babied by his weepy Mother (June Kyoko Lu)--is an incompetent do-it-yourselfer who takes pride in having built his own home and the furniture in it.

The bride’s Sister (Annie LaRussa) plays grope-the-guests under the table, mostly with the groom’s Friend (Larry Cox). And a Husband (Jeremy Lawrence) and Wife (Marek Johnson) fight remorselessly with each other or anyone who gets in the way. One more person is there, known simply as the Young Man (Marc Epstein). He’s everyone’s factotum when circumstance demands it.

What begins in uptight solemnity slowly crumbles, much like the homemade house and furniture, into dissolute glee, slapstick, silliness, name-calling and an unexpectedly upbeat finale for the beleaguered bride and groom.

When enough wine has been drunk, enough whipped cream consumed, enough truths slapped around, the stultified atmosphere lifts and “The Wedding” turns quaintly, deliciously giddy. These awful members of the wedding end up saying exactly what they think whenever they choose to whomever they please. It isn’t exactly Steven Berkoff’s “Kvetch,” where people say one thing while meaning another, but close.

That is more Strnisko’s clever doing than Brecht’s. Brecht points the way, but his conventions are forced. Strnisko doesn’t entirely avoid the awkwardness, but once events loosen up, so does the production. His staging blossoms, his inventiveness grows inspired.

The point? For Brecht it was striking a sly blow for freedom of speech in an interregnum Germany on its way to Nazi repression. The play’s political satire may seem pale and obvious now, but by hiding behind the screen of Brecht’s respectability, Strnisko caused something of a stir with his new and improved “Wedding” in a still-repressive Europe.

Production values at Taper, Too are simple and adequate, but Richard Hoover’s collapsible set is a cut above most and, in the best of all possible worlds, should get the star billing it deserves.