Marriage can be funny

Posted By Terrance Gavan

Posted 9 months ago

Divorce Anyone?

Written by John Patrick

Directed by Wayne Cooper, Northern Lights Pavilion

Nov. 12-14

Opening night at the Northern Lights drew the curtain on a prickly subject; Divorce Anyone?, a play in three acts, is a rollicking and ribald dissection of that frail, fragile, and flimsy flail to whimsy: marriage.

The play is no less poignant today, because it delineates the sometimes ugly, often funny, but above all disturbing alliance of compulsion, compassion and consternation that tend – again with the passage of time – to tarnish, taint and entangle the ritual mores surrounding the pact.

Patrick's best known play is The Teahouse of the August Moon – which won him a Pulitzer and a Tony – but he was a prolific American playwright, and a master of the cluttered life, quick quip, and sardonic twist, all of which were captured with unabashed glee and abandon by three local actors at the Northern Lights Pavilion last Thursday evening.

The play is based in New York City, circa 1975, and describes three very different married couples shakily slipping from blossomed bliss to marital abyss. Three couples in bad need of some fine-tuning. Each act thankfully plays to a foil, the interloping third party, who brings some much-needed counterpoint to the contretemps unfolding on the stage.

The three actors involved included the delightfully wide-eyed Mike Jaycock, the effervescent Brian Kipping, and Haliburton's answer to Lucille Ball, Elke Zilla. All three divorced themselves from any and all inhibitions, and played beautifully against each other in the hilarious and often raunchy romp through the nooks, crannies and loopholes of the marriage contract.

This play was originally slated to run last spring, but all of the actors and some of the crew fell ill with the flu and it had to be postponed. Mike Russell, an actor from Dorset, was penciled in as the husband in acts one and three, but just two weeks before opening night he succumbed to H1N1 and developed pneumonia.

That forced Kipping to step in from the wings and onto centre stage in all three acts.

He had to learn two new parts in the space of about 13 days, a daunting and almost surreal proposition for an actor who was already busy crunching his own lines in act two. But he handled it like a pro, a fact that was not lost on director Wayne Cooper, or long-time costumer and Haliburton Little Theater volunteer Caryl Miller.

"Not only did he learn the part but he had to learn the blocking and so the whole thing had to change," said Miller. "He took the play home on a Friday two weeks ago and on Monday he was already off book, which was extraordinary."

All three acts in the trilogy are introduced through music and prose, handled with grace and aplomb by Cooper and Beth Kipping.

The first play, Compulsion, deals with a frantic husband whose wife Sybil (Zilla) is planning to divorce him after a month of wedded bliss because of some over-energetic sexual demands. Kipping plays the distraught husband Scotty, and he persuades a long-absent visiting friend and Harvard buddy, Joe (Jaycock), to pose as a priest and talk her out of divorce. The only Latin Joe the priest knows is an engraved phrase from an escutcheon in Harvard Yard: fiat lux – let there be light. Sybil eventually sees the light, and turns the table on the Harvard harpies, finally melting husband Scotty into a puddle of pudding at the bedroom door.

In the second play, Integrity, disgruntled husband and penniless actor, Dennis, played by Kipping – sporting a wig, and a tux – argues with his cynical wife Celia, a very successful novelist, played unerringly by Zilla, while her deaf father (Jaycock) studies his chessboard with the bemused smile of a man who has just ingested a full nine yards of Prozac.

The two sycophants slowly smolder, engaging in self-aggrandizing verbal jousts. They are poster kids for dysfunction. In this play it's husband Dennis who threatens divorce, and in the resulting melee, both Dennis and Celia devolve from pathetic pandering, to all-out warfare. Suddenly, golf clubs, hats, tennis rackets and the living room drapes fly out of the open window and into the night sky over New York. Jaycock literally has the audience in stitches with an uproarious array of eye-pops, tics, and manic grins as he ponders chess, life, and a cigarette.

In the third play, Habit, a neglected wife Jessie, asks for a divorce, as her husband Ralph, played to a humdrum tee by Jaycock, is far too absorbed in the New York Times to hear her growingly outrageous comments.

Zilla absolutely sparkles as Jessie, the climax coming when she pulls off her dress, and attempts a handstand while singing the Star Spangled Banner, dressed only in her slip. Very funny stuff.

Ralph finally comes to life, enraged by the appearance of a mysterious man named George (Kipping) who offers some fulsome "services" to Jessie. We learn finally that George is an actor paid by Jessie to rekindle a flame.

George is paid.

Jessie goes back to her needlepoint, and Ralph returns to his sports section.

Normalcy – and married life – is restored.

Fitting way to end this romp.

Divorce Anyone? challenges the norms.

But ultimately it's a celebration of custom.