STAGE REVIEW : Ayckbourn’s ‘Exchanges’: A Fun Game

Imagine a play with 31 possible scenes and 16 possible endings.

Imagine a play in which what happens five seconds into it will determine what happens five days later, and where what happens five days later determines what happens five weeks later, and what happens five weeks later determines what happens five years later. Hard to imagine. But isn’t life that way?

Only from the pen of that British master- farceur Alan Ayckbourn would come such a complex geometric design for a play--or set of playlets. In “Intimate Exchanges,” now at South Coast Repertory, Ayckbourn takes the simplest of domestic situations as his starting point: An unhappy school principal’s wife, Celia Teasdale, contemplates the mess in her weedy garden and her seedy life, as she decides if she should smoke a cigarette. Or not.

From such tiny decisions come big ones, such as whether to leave husband Toby, run off with the handyman, open a bakery, have a nervous breakdown. Or not.

Press that key and this door will open. Press another and that door will open. Complicate matters by having two actors play all the permutations and you have something clever, daunting--and unavoidably restricted by the formulas of two-character scenes.

The fun, of course, is derived as much from seeing just how two actors will get the job done as from watching to see how Ayckbourn is going to get them out of whatever predicament he’s got them in.

It might be fun to see all 16 possible versions of this play, but its feathery lightness rather precludes that any theater would take on such an extrapolation. The two endings director Mark Rucker has chosen at South Coast are different from the two seen at the San Diego Old Globe in 1987, the play’s only other major Southern California exposure.

Here Kandis Chappell, who had also created these roles in San Diego, plays both Celia and her ditsy housekeeper Sylvie Bell. Richard Doyle plays Celia’s unhappy, alcoholic and perverse husband Toby, as well as Lionel Hepplewick, the groundskeeper who comes to do something about their garden and stays to fall in love with Celia.

(In the second version of the play at South Coast, not seen by this writer, Doyle also plays a neighbor named Miles Coombes.)

Part of the difficulty is that Lionel is having an affair with Sylvie, who does not appreciate his wanting to break it off; Toby doesn’t really want to lose Celia, no matter how badly he’s treated her, and Celia isn’t sure what she wants to do.

Most of the first half of these “Intimate Exchanges” is devoted to sorting this out in the Teasdale back yard. The second half happens at a geriatric resort where Celia and Toby are holed up for a week, after he has suffered a mild health disorder--and where the adoring Lionel, fired from his caretaking job at Toby’s school, has come aboard as a waiter.

Imagine the complications. They are quite delicious, even if the scene changes and pace could be quickened a little, not to say a lot.

Production values are simple on South Coast’s Second Stage, with sets, lights and costumes by Cliff Faulkner, Tom Ruzika and Rhonda Earick, respectively, suggesting rather than creating social context. No one plays Ayckbourn’s distraught women better than Chappell (remember her terrific “Woman in Mind” at this theater last year) and her strident Sylvie, a youthful and lazy vulgarian, is even more striking simply for being such a far cry from sedate, middle-class Celia.

Doyle lends intelligence to both Toby and Lionel. The former is filled with acerbic disenchantment; the latter is fairly bursting with romantic enthusiasm for life and love’s possibilities. Credit Ayckbourn for making both men believable and remarkably sympathetic.

Ayckbourn writes dialogue that springs from character and circumstance. The more desperate those are, the funnier the exchanges. Comic integrity is what imbues otherwise superficial events with significance and hilarity. No matter how British the humor, there is a universal truth in the tribulations of these four people that makes us cheerfully embrace all of their faltering imperfections.

It is why one understands, without condoning, Toby’s often cruel cynicism. It is also why one understands Celia not being quite able to leave him. And the final rueful encounter of Lionel and Celia in a churchyard five years later is rich with sobering and quite unfunny emotion. But this is today. Tomorrow, who knows? Things could be entirely different. . . .

* “Intimate Exchanges,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sun., 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Feb. 28. $23-$32; (714) 957-4033). Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes.