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Robert Hurwitt
Sunday, July 8, 2012
The
San Francisco Chronicle
The New World our hero finds
looks a lot like the Old World he's trying to escape in Ken Slattery's
rib-tickling "Truffaldino Says No." That's not just
because of the few changes in Martin Flynn's comically rigged
set. Nor because Truffaldino fled Venice only to arrive in Venice
Beach.
The similarities fuel the
comedic heart of the Shotgun Players and PlayGround co-world premiere
that opened Friday. Slattery's Truffaldino tries to escape his
fate as a traditional commedia dell'arte zanni servant, in the
same-old tried-and-true plots, and arrives in a California sitcom
world full of characters derived from their commedia forebears.
And in situations similarly derived.
This lineage of comic types
and plots played like a thin inside joke in the 10-minute version
of "Truffaldino" at 2009's Best of PlayGround showcase.
But Slattery has fleshed out the idea considerably in the full-length
version, deepening the commedia material and creating modern equivalents.
It helps considerably that
director M. Graham Smith has a fine hand for sight gags and comic
timing. And that, in the generally strong cast, he has a first-rate
physical comic, Stephen Buescher, in the role of the archetypical
zanni Arlecchino.
Arlecchino is the father
of Truffaldino, played with endearing youthful dissatisfaction
by William Thomas Hodgson, who also does a fine job of mirroring
Buescher's acrobatic dance routines in the early scenes. These
are the commedia scenes, piling traditional genre plots atop each
to double the complications in Maggie Whitaker's slyly exaggerated
commedia costumes and Emilia Sumelius-Buescher's classic half-masks.
It's a circus of errant
wooing. The miserly Pantalone (a crotchety, nasal Brian Herndon)
wants to marry off his expensive daughter Isabella (a delightfully
vapid Ally Johnson) to the elderly pedant Dottore (a comically
garrulous Joe Lucas).
But Truffaldino is infatuated
with Isabella, who barely knows he exists. She loves Dottore's
son Flavio (a blithely dainty Michael Phillis, improving his role
from '09), who loves writing love poetry more than any woman).
Meanwhile, Pantalone is trying to bed Arlecchino's wife, Colombina
(an ingeniously salacious Gwen Loeb), and Arlecchino's bumbling
has drawn in the blustering military braggart Il Capitano (a paranoid
Andy Alabran) as another suitor for Isabella. Or Colombina.
Then, in a sharply staged
moment, Truffaldino says no. And leaves for America and a new
life. He quickly becomes manager of a Venice Beach inn full of
modern takes on the same old archetypes, from Buescher's hilariously
bumbling Hal to the miserly and pedantic tenants, paramilitary
security officer and the Valley Girl waitress in on-again-off-again
love with the feckless surfer-boy lifeguard.
Truffaldino falls for the
waitress, of course. Slattery further complicates things as everyone
from the Old World shows up in the new, pursuing Truffaldino or
each other - and meeting themselves as their modern equivalents.
It's all pretty light entertainment, and sometimes a bit thin.
But Smith and the cast play it to the hilt.
Smith keeps finding new
ways to create those meetings. Loeb and Johnson are particular
delights, embodying both their characters at the same time. Hodgson
engagingly anchors the action in the underwritten title role.
And Buescher turns in a tour de force of two roles' worth of eccentric
dance, verbal, facial and bodily tics and variations on falling
down a flight of stairs, and into our hearts.
