‘Two Planks’ Tames Rowdy Comedy

In Academy Award-winning director Anthony Minghella’s 1984 play “Two Planks and a Passion,” romance, buffoonery and moral courage compete. Yet in Cal Rep’s workmanlike West Coast premiere of the play, at Edison Theatre, love is confused, simple faith is celebrated and comedy is mostly thwarted.

Perhaps worried that the audience won’t make it over the archaic linguistic hurdles, director Brian Nelson allows the action to drag in parts, apparently too timid to push the more comedic sections into farce, which is set in 1392. Yet the cast manages to shine at moments.

Richard II (Baron Kelly), his sickly but beloved queen, Anne of Bohemia (Dawn Flood), and their friend, the exiled Earl of Oxford (Patric Taylor), pay a surprise visit to York as the villagers prepare for a Passion play at the Feast of Corpus Christi. The trio conspire to make sport of the obsequious commoners. Vying for royal favor, Mayor William Selby (Ken Rugg) and his wife, Alice (Katie Johnson), ruinously compete with Geoffrey LeKolve (Brian Kapell), master of the painters’ guild, and his wife, Kathryn (Julie Dixon).

Kathryn has taken the painters’ guild’s chaplain (Dan Forcey) as her lover--something well known to her husband’s men. Yet despite this brazen association, spelled out in one scene in which Geoffrey enters his wife’s bedchamber, there is little comedy in the cuckoldry.

As the laborers who suffer at the caprice of their masters, Jeff McGrath, Brian David Price, Pete Uribe, Chad Wood and April Hall set a tone of earnestness and simple honesty that rings true.

Flood and Kelly have some flittingly compelling moments, yet because we can’t really feel the weight of their tragedy--Anne will be dead in two years and Richard will be dethroned and die imprisoned by 1400, becoming the first victim of the War of the Roses--we can’t feel the manic, escapist energy that might make their motives more sympathetic.

Nelson has tamed this rowdy romp into a more pedestrian crawl that draws attention to the morality play at its center, at the expense of the bawdy humor.

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* “Two Planks and a Passion,” California Repertory Theatre Company at Edison Theatre, 213 E. Broadway, Long Beach. Wednesdays-Thursdays, 7 p.m.; Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends May 8. $20. (562) 432-1818. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.