Making a Mockery Fun

Playwrights and their sensibilities go in and out of vogue, and Jean Anouilh’s crisp romantic cynicism has been experiencing something of a resurgence, starting last year when New York’s Roundabout Theatre staged “The Rehearsal.” Now, the Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice has picked up the baton with a lovely production of “Ardele,” a rarely seen gem in the Anouilh canon.

An upper-class household is thrown into a tizzy when Ardele, an unseen middle-aged woman with a hunchback, falls in love with another hunchback and wants to marry him. Her brother, the General (Richard Fancy, also played by William Dennis Hunt), is appalled. He locks Ardele in her room, threatening to keep her there unless she recants her love. He summons his other sister, the age-conscious Countess (Kathleen Garrett, also Betsy Zang), who arrives with her patient husband (Michael Rothhaar) and her preening lover (Robert Lee Jacobs), to help thrash out the problem.

In this household, virtually every grown person is carrying some kind of adulterous torch, including the General’s moralistic daughter-in-law Natalie (Shannon Fill), who’s in love with Nicholas (David Rogge), one of the General’s sons she’s not married to. This is a comic morality tale in which the “normal” people are, in fact, the grotesques, and the hunchback Ardele, of whom they are all deeply ashamed, is living life straight. Both translator Lucienne Hill and director Alec Doyle apply just the right comic tone to these proceedings, allowing us to laugh at and also sympathize with the hypocrites on view as they get entangled in their various webs.

The ensemble is a finely balanced unit, and the set (Kurt Wahlner) and costumes (Audrey Eisner), which charter an upper-class 1912 milieu, are all equally impressive and intelligent. The actors display comic quirks without dehumanizing their characters. Especially effective are Kathleen Garrett, as the countess who lives in terror that her lover will discover her age but otherwise ignores him, and Richard Fancy as the put-upon General, who must race between his mistress, the downstairs maid (Cheryl Dooley) and his insane wife, who shrieks out his name every 10 minutes for reassurance that he is not making love to the maid. Also quite good are Robert Lee Jacobs as the Countess’ tightly strung and dimwitted lover, and Rothhaar as the husband who enjoys tweaking his wife’s lover’s vanity every chance he gets.

Things fall apart in the end, and it is truly difficult to tell whether it is the fault of the play or Sharron Shayne, who plays the General’s bedridden wife Emily. When Emily suddenly breaks lose from her bedroom, shrieking hell-fire for all of the lusting souls in the house, the play’s subtle comic tones disappear and “Ardele” becomes harsh and heavy-handed and, most unfortunately, not funny. But at its best, “Ardele” gently mocks the vanity of love-struck human beings, while keeping the serious consequences of the roundelays--Emily’s insanity and Ardele’s thwarted passion--present but at bay.

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BE THERE

Ardele, Pacific Resident Theatre, 705 1/2 Venice Blvd., Venice, Thur.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. Indefinitely. $18. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.