‘Hay Fever’ has never been this funny
By Johna Strickland - Argus Observer
Sunday, July 1, 2007 12:43 AM PDT
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| Simon Bliss (left), played by Jeffrey C. Hawkins, endures one of his mother Judith’s (Kathleen Pirkl Tague) mood swings. Daughter Sorel (right), played by Sara M. Bruner, joined the rare moment of typical motherly affection in Idaho Shakespeare Festival’s production of Hay Fever. |
Boise - “It’s the funniest play Shakespeare never wrote,” house “doctors” Joe Conley Golden and Tom Willmorth announced as “Hay Fever,” a play in the 31st season of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, began Wednesday night.
Comedy partners Willmorth and Golden performed their usual “Greenshow” to prepare the audience. Dressed in white lab coats, they browsed the audience swiping cauliflower “to test for allergies.” A half-full bottle of wine was fished from a theater-goer’s cooler.
“We don’t drink out of the bottle anymore.” Willmorth told the couple. “We brought cups.”
Golden produced two little green cups and a wedding style toast to “15 years of Greenshows” followed.
The audience received a last question: Do you have an allergy to William Shakespeare?
“Don’t suffer in silence just to impress your artsy friends,” Golden warned.
Shakespeare sufferers were safe Wednesday though when season opener “Hay Fever,” by Noel Coward, played to a nearly full house.
Set in 1925 at a country estate in England, “Hay Fever” introduces the Bliss family and their escapades with a house full of company and a surly maid Clara (Lynn Allison) who asserted several times “There’s no food in the house.”
In the first few minutes, the family’s company-behavior was called into question when daughter Sorel (Sara M. Bruner) announced she was having a man down for the weekend.
Sorel: “We’re so greatly bad-mannered.”
Simon: “Not to people we like.”
Sorel: “Abnormal, Simon, that’s what we are.”
Then in blew the queen of the show and matriarch of her family — Judith Bliss (Kathleen Pirkl Tague).
Judith’s sharp tongue and dramatic flairs left over from her career in the theater made her family roll their eyes with lines like: “You look awfully dirty, Simon, what have you been doing?”
“Not washing very much,” was the sullen reply from her son.
Before long, Judith revealed she too had a guest — “some dreary infatuated young man,” Sorel said — coming to meet her daughter.
To complete the disastrous weekend, father David (Aled Davies) announced he’d invited a “flapper” down to study her so he can finish off “That Sinful Woman,” his latest novel, and Simon delivered the news of his own female guest. Judith was not pleased.
“Why on earth don’t you fall in love with nice young girls instead of self-centered vampires?” she asked.
The four houseguests soon found out just who they had come to visit — “divinely mad family,” as Myra Arundel (Laura Perrotta), Simon’s guest put it.
Through failed parlor games, chilly receptions, dropped luggage and bare feet, the family frolicked, never noticing the affect their quarreling and eccentric ways had on their guests.
In Act II, romance developed just as Judith hoped, though, not quite with the people she planned.
She did find “new” love for a few brief moments with one male guest.
After all, David was getting older, she said, and leaving him would be good novel material.
“David’s been a good husband to me, but he’s wearing a bit thin,” Judith said. “(Besides) they say suffering is good for writers.”
“Hay Fever” will twist your gut with laughter and the final scenes in Act II and III will stretch your mind to discern if the Blisses really meant all the shenanigans they pulled, or was it all a game.
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