RUMORS
You know Rumors is going to be farce from the moment you see the set, a living room in an upscale suburban home. The doors tip you off: four on the first floor, three on the landing of the second floor. Mistaken identity and disguised intentions are the stock-in-trade of farce, requiring many frantic, cleverly timed entrances and exits.
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Set in the elegant residence of a well-heeled New York City deputy mayor (the play was conceived during the scandal-ridden administration of former mayor Ed Koch), Rumors concerns mishaps at a formal dinner party celebrating the politician’s tenth wedding anniversary. The politician himself never appears during the play: he’s lying upstairs in his bedroom, bleeding from a self-inflicted bullet wound in his earlobe. His distraught attorney, the first to arrive, scampers around trying to hide the potential scandal, which means lying to every new pair of guests who walk through the door–each of whom have their own potential scandals to be concerned about–and finally to a team of cops, those blue-clad upholders of solid righteousness dispatched to control the excesses of the formally dressed aristocrats who dominate the play (class conflict being another hallmark of farce).
It is Brandenburg who introduces that other staple of the farce, physical impairment: Lenny suffered whiplash in a car accident on his way to the party. This paves the way for Ken’s subsequent deafness, the result of a pistol going off near his head; the sciatic convulsions of Cookie Cusack (Lolly Trauscht), the TV cooking-show hostess who is pressed into service to prepare the evening’s meal owing to the mysterious disappearance of both the household staff and the wife whose tenth anniversary is to be celebrated; the burned hand suffered by Cookie’s husband, Ernie (Dale Benson, whose tremulous-voice shtick proves intermittently amusing if you haven’t heard it a dozen times before); and the bloody nose adulterous politician Glenn Cooper (Howard Platt) gets from his jealous wife, Cassie (Kathryn Jaeck). Naturally the wounded all go to the same doctor–and naturally they all page him, on the very night he’s finally obtained high-priced, hard-to-come-by tickets to Phantom of the Opera. (“Who’s playing the Phantom tonight?” asks one character, Simon’s dig at a mediocre show sustained by the good reviews of its original, long-departed star.)
