SMELLING A RAT
What this experiment demonstrated was that a feeble script can support only a limited amount of intelligence and ingenuity. Some actors did give such inventive performances that they actually propped up the material–or at least their portions of it. But even with outstanding performances by the whole cast, the inherent weaknesses of the play eventually caused the production to collapse.
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The Famous Door Theatre Company seems to be conducting a similar experiment. Smelling a Rat, a would-be farce by Mike Leigh, a British playwright and film director, has no pretensions to profundity. It’s just a silly comedy, the kind that would do well on the stage of any suburban dinner theater.
The play is directed by Michael Sokoloff, a successful local fight choreographer whose talent for creating rapid, reckless movement is quickly apparent. In the first scene Rex returns home from vacation without his wife and wordlessly unpacks his suitcase. On the page the scene is dull, but Sokoloff has turned it into a hyperkinetic ballet, performed to that familiar, frenetic tune often played at the circus when the acrobats perform. Peeples races around the room, stashing his clothes, golf clubs, and bags in one or another of the seven side-by-side closets on the back wall of the set. He carries his toiletries into the bathroom, and finally throws his wife’s stuffed animals off the bed, finishing just as the final note sounds. But before Rex can relax he hears someone coming, so he grabs a gun from the nightstand drawer and hides in one of the closets.
