Shark Box Theatre’s production is a farce worth the trip up the hill

There’s a lot to love about a good farce, where reality is bent and twisted into a series of misunderstandings, mistaken identities, outsized characters, lies, slamming doors and physical comedy all aimed at one primal response: laughter.

Farce may be formulaic, but it’s always fun to take in one I hadn’t seen before. For its production of Run for Your Wife, a 1983 comedy by Ray Cooney, Shark Box Theatre compiled a game, talented cast under the taut direction of Mark Walden to provide a solid parade of laughs centered on the reliably funny topic of bigamy.

John Smith is a London taxi driver juggling two wives in two flats in adjoining neighborhoods. He’s managed to pull off this stunt by maintaining a precise schedule he follows religiously. But when he jumps in to help a woman being mugged and gets knocked on the head, a trip to the hospital triggers a sudden, violent tremor in his house of cards.

Robert Martin plays John as an unrepentant adulterer focused more on his management of the two marriages than on the morality of it all. His lack of guilt and inability to accept responsibility for the mayhem he’s causing makes him a foil for the action around him even as he holds the main character role. In fact, he successfully foists a lot of the disaster response onto his friend and neighbor Stanley Gardener, played with gleeful verve by Braden Egtvedt.

The action builds across a split-screen stage defining the two flats: stage left is the Wimbledon home of John and Wife No. 1 Mary (Yashila Permeswaran); stage right is his Streatham home with Wife No. 2 Barbara (Elicia Hesselgrave). Steve Walden’s set is defined by two colors with shared and separate elements while also functioning as a single residence when needed. There’s only one kitchen door, for example, down left, and at times the actors occupy the same places while only paying attention to the ones they’re supposed to see at one time.

It’s a clever, functional solution to defining John’s two physical worlds, and the large playing area at StageDoor Theatre affords it plenty of room.

Although we’re in London, only some of the characters have British accents, which is a tad confusing. There’s no reference to John and Mary being American, but that’s how they talk. Meanwhile Barbara and the cops do have local accents, pulled off with varying degrees of success.

Wes Munsil and Elicia Hesselgrave in ‘Run for Your Wife’ | Photo: Mark Walden

Blast off

Once the cops start nosing around at both flats, the lies John and Stanley begin telling get progressively ridiculous and contradictory. Their toughest sell is in Wimbledon, where humorless, highly suspicious Detective Sergeant Troughton is played nicely by Dalton Metz. In Streatham, it’s well-known Colorado actor Wes Munsil as DS Porterhouse.

At first, I thought Munsil’s character was getting short shrift line-wise, but in Act Two he’s got a bounty of comic material handed to him as he becomes more involved in the all-lies part of the story as an “unofficial” participant. Once John IDs himself and Stanley as lovers to get out of one cul-de-sac, it’s not long before the Streatham flat becomes a den of supposed iniquity and the clueless Porterhouse is revealing some of his sexual proclivities with his own wife — who’s dubbed him “Pussy.”

This is where Cooney’s script shows its age, with a host of outdated gay jokes that veer into offensive territory. There are limp-wrist gestures, slurs like “Tinkerbell,” “Pansy,” “Nancy” and “Fairy” and plenty of revulsion at the notion of homosexuality. I’m not great at predicting what the queer community will find offensive or hilarious, but just know that layers upon layers of Three’s Company-style gags and double entendres are rife in the second act.

This set of mistaken gender identity does come with a fair share of laughs, particularly when Munsil’s character decides to make tea amid the chaos and emerges from the kitchen with a particularly fetching little apron of Mary’s. It’s a well-written character with plenty of unexpected lines that Munsil delivers expertly. He reminded me of Buster Keaton walking through a construction zone oblivious to the houses nearly falling on him or boards that just miss whacking him in the face.

Another notable performance was that of the Streatham flat’s upstairs neighbor, Bobby Franklyn. Max Loria’s program bio says it’s his acting debut, but he brings so much color and quirk to this smaller part with every entrance that I found myself looking forward to his next appearance. Soft spoken at times, I missed some of his lines and hope that he turns up the volume in future performances.

As the two wives, Hesselgrave and Permesaran are tasked with making the most of two-dimensional characters written to be in a nearly constant state of shock and anger. It’s a tough assignment but the two do a good job of differentiating themselves — Hesselgrave as a lustful dingbat and Permesaran as a woman who knows she’s being duped but can’t put her finger on what’s really going on.

It’s hard to overstate how tricky it is to stage a farce with this level of traffic control, particularly as Act Two devolves into an utterly absurd melee as John’s two identities converge. Flourishing in the center of it all is Egtvedt, whose winking, wild-eyed performance teeters just on the edge of being too much without going over. Walden’s direction of the whole mess is bang on, and the whole cast deserves props for what was assuredly an intense rehearsal process to get it all down.

Assembled by some School of Mines grads, Shark Box Theatre has been around for a few years now and starting to find its footing — and a more permanent space. Denver-area theatregoers may balk at driving “all the way up to Conifer,” but it only took me about 40 minutes from Highlands Ranch. There’s one more weekend of Run for Your Wife, and it’s worth the trip.

Standouts Max Loria and Braden Egtvedt in ‘Run for Your Wife’ It’s the kind of script that could only work in the pre-iPhone era. | Photo: Mark Walden