It can be like biting into a piece of chocolate expecting some sort of nut, but getting a Mexican jumping bean. Even while the Theatre Rhino production of Noel Coward's Present Laughter surrounds its center with traditional confectioneries, soon enough you hit that mystifying choice for its core.
Director John Fisher, who also plays that core, has upped the ante of the reevaluations of Coward's 1939 comedy that Coward conceived of as a vehicle for himself and acknowledged is a parody of himself. Those more recent productions, including high-profile efforts on Broadway and in London, have been eager to emphasize any homosexual subtext that the determinedly closeted Coward wove through the script. A little of that goes a long way, but Fisher probably thinks that this befits the mission of a queer theater.
The play itself wavers between drawing-room comedy and frantic farce, as the self-dramatizing London stage actor Garry Essendine luxuriantly suffers through young ladies overstaying their one-night-stand welcome, various visitors angling for favors, intrusive phone calls, social obligations that elicit oversized sighs, and an estranged wife acting as ballast whenever the good ship Essendine begins to list.
While Coward offered an exaggerated vision of himself, that of a jester who sees himself as the ultimate truth-teller, the role may also remind you of John Barrymore in his later years, when he resorted to playing parodies based on his notoriety. You can see that in Fisher's performance as Essendine, for whom overacting has become the norm on and offstage. But he too often squelches the laughter from his comic flamboyance as he goes into inexplicable and inappropriate seizures of shtick that you might find if Milton Berle, Lou Costello, or Curly from the Three Stooges were in the role.
In one particular stunning example, when Essendine's secretary reads him a letter from an acquaintance named Joe, Essendine remembers him fondly. "Joe was wonderful," he says. "I met him in a bar in Marseilles. What does he want?" That's a line of ambiguous sexual possibilities, but his secretary gives a straightforward answer: "It's at the end, after a bit about his sister having a baby." But the words "at the end" throws Fisher's Essendine into a paroxysm of mugging, tongue-lolling, and a mimed replication of getting buggered in the arse.
And yet surrounding all this indulgence, director Fisher offers a well-staged and smartly acted production that knows what Present Laughter is supposed to look like. There is a small coterie surrounding Essendine whose job it is to keep him propped up and lucratively employed, with characters coming and going through a room filled with doors available for the indiscreet to hide in Gilbert Johnson's art deco set. Those characters are attractively outfitted in David Draper's period costumes.
Kathryn Wood and Tina D'Elia, as his secretary and semi-ex-wife, know how to draw laughs with their long-suffering takes on Essendine's all-too-familiar behavior. Adrienne Dolan as an aspiring actress smitten with Essendine and Amanda Farbstein as a seductive vixen blithely play their roles in keen fashion. Carlos Barrera and Adam Simpson are theatrical business associations, with Simpson especially drawing laughter with a demeanor always bordering on the morose. Essendine is also tormented by a disturbingly eccentric playwright infatuated with his idol, and director Fisher pushes absurdist homoerotic maneuvers onto these scenes. There are more amusing moments provided by Ryan Engstrom as Essendine's unpolished butler and Adrienne Krug as his surly housekeeper.
But the bottom line remains Fisher's performance as Essendine, and as we saw earlier in the season when he played another character Coward wrote for himself in A Song at Twilight, it is clear that he has his particular vision of how these roles should be played. That probably won't be changed in any fundamental ways, but ratcheting it down one or two or 20 notches is something that might be considered for the good of all.
Present Laughter will run through June 18 at the Eureka Theatre. Tickets are $15-$35. Call (800) 838-3006 or go to therhino.org.