British Invasion

Alan Ayckbourn’s plays, which number an astonishing 55 and counting, communicate with an accent that is very, very British.

For the Southern California premiere of his 1994-vintage comedy, “Communicating Doors,” the Laguna Playhouse has recruited two lead actresses, Deanne Mercer Dennis and Helen Wassell, who won’t have to sweat the accent. They were the victors among scores of Southern California-based British actors who stormed the auditions. American hopefuls were greatly outnumbered, according to casting director Wally Ziegler, but still managed to win all four supporting roles.

Mercer Dennis and Wassell have offered their cohorts dialect coaching on a word here, a sound there.

“They’re all playing Brits and doing very well,” Mercer Dennis said. “I don’t think Americans will be able to tell [the difference]. An English person might be able to tell.”

It would be hard for anybody to tell that the two actresses were strangers until a month ago. During a recent interview at the Playhouse’s rehearsal and workshop annex in Laguna Hills, they finished thoughts for each other like old friends.

“Communicating Doors” requires teamwork on several levels. The play begins in 2020 with Mercer Dennis’ character, Ruella Welles, a long-dead murder victim. Wassell’s Phoebe, who calls herself Poopay--French for “doll”--in her vocation as a dominatrix for hire, is a strong candidate for the same fate, in the same swank hotel room, at the hands of the same sociopathic bad guy. Phoebe escapes his clutches with a desperate dash through one of those usually locked doors between adjoining hotel rooms--and finds herself face-to-face with Ruella in the year 2000.

The action follows numerous farcical forays through those “communicating doors,” never leaving the London hotel while it zigzags in 20-year leaps from 1980 to 2020.

It’s a buddy-picture of a play in which the very proper, formidably poised, upper-class Ruella teams with the cockney orphan Phoebe to bend time to save their skins--as well as that of a third woman. Also hanging in the balance are the soul of Reece, the amiable but corrupt tycoon whose partner is the play’s warped heavy, and the future of London, which has become a dystopian “Blade Runner”-like battleground.

Mercer Dennis and Wassell say that beyond the rapid-snap timing that makes farce work, they must find a way to bring emotional layers to the play. It has drawn wildly conflicting reviews in other productions--from Newsday’s “slick, mechanical claptrap about nothing at all” to “lovely and touching [with] sweetness as deep as sorrow” in the Washington Post. Laguna’s leading ladies are aiming for the latter.

“It’s fast,” the exuberant Wassell began, “but it has this beautiful, underlying . . .”

“Romance,” concluded Mercer Dennis, who is a more restrained type befitting a Ruella. “I guarantee people will cry. It will be moving. Personally, I don’t like it being called a farce.”

“There will be tons of laughter, too,” Wassell hastened to add. “We’re still having this problem [in rehearsals] of trying not to corpse.”

And how might “to corpse,” a charming and peculiar Anglicism like many strewn through Ayckbourn’s play, translate in American?

“It’s a theatrical term. Corpsing. When you’re in a situation and something is so hilarious you can’t help laugh,” Wassell said.

After communicating through a door with their American fellow actors, who were waiting in a nearby lounge for rehearsal to begin, the Englishwomen reported that the equivalent Stateside term of art is “go off.”

Ayckbourn is noted for writing sympathetic women and obtuse men into his plays. Mercer Dennis and Wassell praise their understanding actor husbands for being good sports in a situation that a more Ayckbournian sort of fellow might find intolerable.

Mercer Dennis got the part after tagging along to auditions with her better-known husband, Peter Dennis, a veteran English actor who has won plaudits for his one-man touring show of readings from A.A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh” stories. The husband, like some 50 or 60 other Britons, went away empty-handed; the wife got the lead after wangling an audition without an appointment.

For Mercer Dennis, 52, it’s part of a comeback that began in 1997 after more than 10 years away from acting. In England, she said, directors stopped casting her in good roles as she neared 40, so she dropped out of the theater. She moved to Calabasas in 1992, joining her husband, who had done much of his work in the United States.

Wassell, 35, also was a tag-along. Her husband, New Yorker Alex Paez, headed for Hollywood last month in hopes of landing a part in a television pilot (they met when he played Ritchie Valens in the London production of “The Buddy Holly Story,” in which Wassell also was cast).

Wassell, a New York resident since 1997, was planning on “a nice two-month vacation” but decided to make it a working trip by auditioning as Phoebe. She had seen the West End production of “Communicating Doors” and made a note that playing a dominatrix in leather scanties (at least for the first act, until Ruella sensibly sees that she wears something “proper”) might be her thing.

“It’s always good to do parts far removed from your own life,” she said. “Usually I get cast as the nice, sweet, girl-next-door type.”

Both actresses said their husbands are “over the moon,” as the Brits are wont to say, about their unexpected leaps into the spotlight.

Andrew Barnicle, the play’s director and the Playhouse’s artistic director, said he has noticed an influx of British acting talent into Southern California.

“I was looking for actors who could do authentic British accents, and these two obviously had that one covered,” he said.

Ziegler, the casting director, estimated that 60 of the 80 to 100 actors who auditioned were British, Irish or Australian.

“I’d answer my phone and get ‘ ‘Ello, I’m trying for the part.’ Our next show is from Ireland [the U.S. premiere of “Kevin’s Bed,” first produced at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre]. I’m just starting to get submissions. It’s not as overwhelming as the British one, but I can already see a lot of Seans and O’Caseys.”

Mercer Dennis and Wassell can play American accents too, but as British transplants, they accept their fate of being typecast.

“Everything is pigeonhole, and we’ve got our pigeonhole,” Mercer Dennis said.

“And why try and fight it?” chimed in Wassell.

“There are some very good English actors out here,” Mercer Dennis noted. “The competition is tough.”

Wassell took up the thought. “It’s a tough profession. Full stop. Period.”

BE THERE

“Communicating Doors,” by Alan Ayckbourn, at the Laguna Playhouse’s Moulton Theater, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Through March 26. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. (except March 26) and Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. $21-$40. (949) 497-2787.