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Jill Agopsowicz and Mathew Hulshof in The Cottage, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

y Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Teatro Live!, a theatre devoted to comedy in all its aerobic permutations, launches their 45th anniversary season with a cunningly constructed, inflatable/ deflatable spoof that’s all dressed up (and undressed, too) as a bustling 1920s sex farce. Noel Coward meets Same Time Next Year, with a winking glance at master farceur Ray Cooney, and the farce within a farce Nothing On that’s embedded in Noises Off.

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The Cottage is a 2013 spoof (it arrived on Broadway a decade after that), saucy in a funny old-fashioned way, of sex farces and Coward-ly comedies, by the American playwright Sandy Rustin. And Farren Timoteo’s production, at six actors strong unusually large for a Teatro outing, gives his game cast the chance to exercise their considerable comic chops creating vivid size-large characters and inventing detailed stage business that makes a gasp, a double-take, a quizzical look, a pause into a Moment.

They’re all dolled up in a gorgeous array of vintage duds (designer Brian Bast has had a field day). And the coupling and the de- and re-coupling all happen on a fulsome velvet-lined set (designer: Ami Farrow) that even has a window box seat where a guilty party, or a body, might spend some quality time if all the farce doors are used up in the course of the action (hey, just like Arsenic and Old Lace).

The set-up is pure sex farce. Sylvia (Jill Agopsowicz) and suave barrister Beau (Mathew Hulshof), a couple “stuck in the wrong marriages” as the former puts it, sneak off once a year for one night of hot and steamy “unwife-ly sex” (the latter’s phlegmatic term) at Beau’s family cottage. “I wish you were my husband,” Sylvia pouts. She flings her negligé-clad self into classic romantic poses and trills away so outrageously, as per the chosen Act I performance style of the production, you’re entitled to wonder if these two have figured out they’re players in a spoof, starring as the illicit lovers. Hold that thought.   

Anyhow, after seven successive annual one-night stands, when the Act I morning-after comes, Sylvia, Beau’s sister-in-law incidentally, has impulsively sent telegrams to their spouses going public with the affair, much to Beau’s horror. And that’s when the knocks at the door begin.

The Cottage, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

It starts with Beau’s formidable very pregnant wife Marjorie (Lauren Boyd), then Beau’s fussy dimbulb brother (Brennan Campbell). And it moves right along to an adorable, mysteriously daffy woman (Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks), described in the dramatic personae as “an awfully pretty, sometimes wise, nincompoop” and later still, to her ex-, who may or may not be a gentle soul. They all arrive with “news.”

Every time you think of The Cottage as a multi-door sex farce, Rustin deliberately undermines that thought, and changes the geometry. In farces, there’s a price to be paid for discovery; here, surprise!, a secret uncovered is “a relief,” for reasons I leave you to discover. Instead of getting more and more alarmingly teeter-y, the stakes are constantly being lowered, or subverted, or swept aside. Which makes The Cottage a kind of anti-farce.

Meanwhile, Rustin includes jokes about every kind of vintage drawing room cliché. Cigarettes are hidden everywhere on the set and the characters, in the most unlikely places; no one admits to smoking and everyone smokes. There is no crisis too life-and-death extreme to eliminate the question “would you care for a cup of tea?” to which the answer is always Yes. Meltdowns pause for polite admiration of Sylvia’s lovely negligé and Beau’s robe.

There’s physical comedy, too, along with disguises and mistaken identity crises. The kitchen door swings, and flings characters carrying cups of tea or glasses of scotch towards each other. The fart joke seems to be borrowed from some other play altogether. The great Noel wasn’t big on those.   

Mathew Hulshof (left) in The Cottage, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The double-knot geometry that turns a love triangle into a rectangle and then some sort of hexagon gets so wobbly that the whole idea of cheating vs marriage, outrage, and guilt seems to get dizzy and fall over backwards. Sylvia’s outrage at Beau for being “unfaithful to the one you’re being unfaithful with” is a typical logic-twister. But it’s only a double, and there are triples in The Cottage. Maybe one character’s blithe assumption that it’s all a game — secrecy vs revelation, or who’s whose -ex — isn’t so daffy after all.

Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks and Jill Agopsowicz in The Cottage, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The play seems to fall apart along these many fracture lines, including little nudges along the contemporary/vintage frontier. But farces have dangerous edges, and The Cottage is pretty mild-mannered to have a play date in this company. What doesn’t fall apart is the cast’s unfailing gamesmanship for comic invention, led by director Timoteo’s expertise and attention. The cast is funnier than the play.

In truth I found the opening scenes a little over-heated and forced for establishing the surface decorum that farce (and hence pretend-farce) play near-miss with.  But after that, I got more engaged. There’s fun to be had in watching Hulshof, a great comic actor, doing a slow burn, exit through the kitchen door with one set of assumptions and return seconds later appalled by a new morsel of info. When Beau finally reaches the point of no return, it’s an explosion to be savoured.

Mathew Hulshof and Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks in The Cottage, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

The comic timing of Campbell as the brother, constantly upstaged by his sibling and processing things a half-beat behind, is impeccable, too. He’s very funny as a man besotted by Romance until he’s distracted by real estate. You’ll enjoy Boyd’s purse-lipped, grim Marjorie, who has a glare that could shellac a crumpet at 100 paces. Jimenez-Hicks’ character, whose provenance I cannot reveal, is a delight, a chatterbox kook who occasionally surprises everyone with perfectly turned-out, sage epigrams. Tkaczyk, in his Teatro debut, has a top-flight deadpan, and a way with open-mouthed surprise and horror that will make you laugh out loud every time.

Jake Tkaczyk and Jill Agopsowicz in The Cottage, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

And Agopsowicz’s Sylvia, who’s the central character as it turns out, gets more and more amusing as she figures out that her main problem isn’t the endless quest for Romance, or Love, or reasonable facsimiles, it’s … men. Yes, there are choices to be had in life, even for women in 1923.

The ending I confess I don’t quite get. But the gap, sometimes insurmountable, between love and romance, with or without sex, which is The Cottage’s opening gambit, has wrinkles you’ll find comical in the play. An evening of laughter to set the season in motion: go for it.

REVIEW

The Cottage

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Sandy Rustin

Directed by: Farren Timoteo

Starring: Jill Agopsowicz, Mathew Hulshof, Lauren Boyd, Brennan Campbell, Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks, Jake Tkaczyk

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Nov. 29

Tickets: teatrolive.com