We paid what we could – or would, which was a sawbuck apiece – to see Amy Freed’s new play Restoration Comedy at the Seattle Rep Tuesday night, directed by Sharon Ott.
As you might expect, it was an amusing play – though not quite as amusing as the comedies which it adapts must have been to their original Restoration audience. Freed has a knack, which we first encountered in her Shakespeare authorship pastiche The Beard of Avon, for picking up antique English dialects well enough to make her historical impersonations fairly authentic – and sometimes even downright poetic.
Unfortunately, she also likes to play to the peanut gallery by throwing in cliched contemporary slang to become the punchlines of her jokes, as if the period stuff is merely the straight man to a pedestrian and at times bathetic sense of humor. Worse, in Restoration Comedy she seems to have Oprahcized her originals, making them didactic in a women’s self-help book kind of way: the first act teaches the lesson that all women need to do to keep their men interested is roleplay sexual games with them, the second act that an excessive sense of virtue should be dispensed with when they finally encounter their soul mate. Two plays in one night, however condensed and bowdlerized, was also a bit much.
Ott began her association with Freed a few years back, when she brought her The Beard of Avon to the Rep, which I reviewed in greater earnest than I can muster these days on my former domain shakespeare.com – now leased out to the enotes folks. I’ll link a copy archived at my other domain shakespeare.nowheres.com here at later leisure.
Oddly, as it turns out Ott is also my neighbor – as I found out for sure a few months ago when my next-door neighbor organized a little meet-the-neighbors party and she and her family showed up. I look up at her house across the street.
As for pay-what-you-can night, it’s a hallowed Seattle institution: the Rep and the Intiman both offer it the last preview before opening night. Some institutional investor must underwrite it; it appeals to our sense of a bargain, and allows us to get tickets at the last minute – typically I drive down at lunchtime – if we decide to go to a play. More people should avail themselves of it. When I reviewed plays semi-professionally on shakespeare.com, I used to go for free of course, and get a press packet as well as the comped opening night tickets.
Now I prefer to pay my own way. That way, if a play’s not worth reviewing, I don’t need to spend much if any time doing it. I hate to feel beholden to the objects of my criticism.
