Scene-Stealing Enhances a Classic Feydeau Farce

“Am I overdoing it?” Onstage at the Geffen Playhouse, Carol Kane is asking herself that question as Madame Latour, an unforgettably blowzy, lustful, drunken ruin of French nobility, and you thank the gods of theater that the answer is yes.

In its best moments, David Schweizer’s staging of Georges Feydeau’s sexless sex farce “He Hunts” (a.k.a. “Monsieur Chasse!”) boils down to an Olympic-class event in tag-team scene-stealing. But at the opening performance on Wednesday, it was Kane who proved the master thief.

Abandoning her endearing squeak of a voice for a sound halfway between Tallulah Bankhead and Maggie Smith, she delivered cliches (“Do not knock it until you’ve tried it”) as if they were brilliant aphorisms and epigrams as if they were extra commandments that Moses forgot to mention.

“Society will excuse bad behavior,” she intoned late in Act 1, “but it will never, never forgive bad taste.” That’s as deep as “He Hunts” ever gets, though Feydeau’s study of what we might call transactional adultery does expertly skewer 1892 French morality as a public sham--an act of theater in which nobody suspends disbelief for long.

As translated and adapted by Philip Littell, the play is a French tease, with everyone talking about sex, planning sex, remembering sex but nobody getting any. Even before the play begins, Chris Barreca’s gleaming upholstered proscenium (like the headboard of a bed) and peek-a-boo front curtain get us into the proper spirit by creating a kind of boudoir stage. Domestic scenes take place inside thick walls of simmering red and seduction amid flowing fabrics of gold and white.

Nobody looks more handsome in David Zinn’s period costumes than Valarie Pettiford as Leontine, and nobody projects wordless consternation more forcefully. Essentially “He Hunts” is her story: a wife learning that her husband is unfaithful and launching her own experiment in infidelity. Replacing the originally cast Megan Mullally, Pettiford anchors the action in resolutely reasonable behavior, which makes the lovers’ spats less fun than they might be but gives the rest of the cast a performance of authority to play against.

And play they do. You could argue that “He Hunts” never really comes alive, that Feydeau’s innovations in plotting and pacing have been so completely absorbed into the mechanics of farce on stage, screen and the tube that there’s nothing left in the play itself to surprise us and no character to care about.

But you’d be forgetting these aggressively colorful performances--Cathy Lind Hayes as Babet, for instance, a maid who exudes profound existential distaste in every look and inflection. Or Alan Mandell as Bridois, a magistrate just as eager to uphold the law as cop a feel and not too old to manage both simultaneously. Or Daniel Kucan as Gontreins, the athletic new-generation lecher, so hot that he doesn’t always check his partners’ genders before jumping their bones.

Most desperate of all, Stephen Nichols as Moricet seems always on the verge of bedding Leontine but suffers a plague of humiliations--including being constantly upstaged by Kane.

Nichols whines effectively and his air of desperate improvisation when things go from catastrophe to worse earns plenty of laughs.

But you never believe the lust in his performance and, without a sexual imperative, key scenes remain underdriven.

Similarly, Maxwell Caulfield makes the Teflon philanderer Duchotel a little too businesslike, genuinely emotional only for a single instant, and then strictly as a matter of pride. As circumstances pile up against him in the final scene, he could be much funnier if we glimpsed something other than his unflappable, bone-deep dishonesty.

Caulfield adopts British inflections for the role while Hayes gives us a French maid with a French accent. V.J. Foster as the crusty Cassecul goes for corn pone Americana and Kucan behaves as if he’s auditioning for a Disney Channel teen series.

But nobody beats Pettiford, who can rasp and coo in the same phrase and go from grande dame pretension to say-what street jive just as fast.

They may be all left swimming in the wake of Kane’s towering eccentricities, but they animate a relic of theater history with enough zest that they, too, can say they’re overdoing it, to the greater glory of French drama, Western culture and sheer excess as a principle to live by.

“He Hunts,” Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 7:30 p.m. Fridays, 8 p.m. Saturdays, 4 and 8:30 p.m. Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Closes May 19. $28 to $46. (310) 208-5454. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.

*

“He Hunts”

Maxwell Caulfield...Duchotel

Paul Ellis...Cop

V. J. Foster...Cassecul

Cathy Lind Hayes...Babet

Carol Kane...Madame Latour

Daniel Kucan...Gontreins

Alan Mandell...Bridois

Stephen Nichols...Moricet

Valarie Pettiford...Leontine Duchotel

Robert Porch...Cop

By Georges Feydeau, translated and adapted from “Monsieur Chasse!” by Philip Littell. Directed by David Schweizer. Scenic design by Chris Barreca. Costumes by David Zinn. Lighting by Anne Militello. Sound by Jonathan Burke. Original music: Peter Golub. Stage manager: George Boyd. Dramaturg: Amy Levinson Millan.