‘Incorruptible’ Looks at a Madcap Monastic Disorder

If Thomas Aquinas had written for the Marx Brothers, the result might have been a bit like “Incorruptible,” Michael Hollinger’s broad and breezy farce, now at the Colony Theatre.

The action is set in Priseaux, a rural French village, in the year 1250. Set decorator Richard Hardin has ingeniously rigged the set from the Colony’s current main-stage show, “The Clearing,” to resemble the chapter house of a medieval monastery--the unlikely but bizarrely apt arena where Hollinger’s screwball comedy unfolds. Imagine “My Man Godfrey” in a hair shirt, and you’ll get the idea.

The monastery’s monks, headed by Abbot Charles (cherubic D. Ewing Woodruff), are in a fine mess. Their resident saint, whose bones grace the chapel altar, hasn’t performed a single miracle in 13 years. The disgusted locals won’t pay to pray anymore, and the pilgrims who once flocked to Priseaux are now giving the town a wide berth.

Down to their last bag of millet, the monks are about to tear their tonsures out, when Jack (Brian Taylor), a cheerful vagabond, unwittingly shows them the path to prosperity--recycling the bones from the local churchyard as saintly relics. But ecclesiastical fraud begets unforeseen complications, especially after Brother Martin (Kurt A. Boesen), the order’s resident curmudgeon, promises to produce an “incorruptible”--that is, a saint whose body is untouched by decay--in time for a papal visit.

Irreverent but never disrespectful, Hollinger’s play has the potential to be a bona fide gut-buster. Here, however, it is a gem in need of polish.

Michael David Wadler’s staging only intermittently achieves the level of multifaceted lunacy that this material requires, and the cast occasionally seems under-rehearsed. A shining exception is Cindy Warren as the malignant Abbess Agatha, the prototypical female canine from hell. Splendidly hammy, Warren comes in late in the play. And even in that long habit, she manages to run away with the show, effortlessly.

*

“Incorruptible,” Colony, 555 N. 3rd St., Burbank. Tuesdays-Wednesdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Nov. 17. $15. (818) 558-7000. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.