Hiller Directs Entertaining and Sly Screwball Comedy

by HUGH HUNTER

The Old Academy Players is completing its current season with the running of Return Engagements. Directed by Chestnut Hill resident Helga Krauss, the play is an entertaining screwball comedy that gives new meaning to the concept of “family values.”

Veteran Canadian playwright Bernard Slade has a long career of creating frolicsome sitcoms for American television. (Bewitched, Bridget loves Bernie, The Flying Nun). Wacky as these may be, they are all innocent enough. But in writing for theater, Slade gives vent to a more naughty side and plays around with the issues of love and marriage. It is clearly not the sort of family values that our sermonizing, radio talk-show gurus have in mind.

Written in vignette form, the first act consists of three scenes, each beginning with ill-matched lovers arising from bed in the same Stratford hotel room. Daisy is a driven actress. In her self-absorbed way she wonders aloud about her amorous behavior, as though her lover Ray (Matt Chicchi) were not even present. Indeed, why did she go to bed with Ray, the hotel bellboy, just hours before her upcoming wedding to Dave?

Miranda is a displaced Pole who desperately wants a baby. So she pays Joseph (Chuck Mueller) $7 a shot to have sex with her. When she does get pregnant, she rejects lovelorn Joseph’s marriage offer, but as a token of her affection, she gives him the secret recipe of her mother’s Polish sausage.

And in scene three, Oliver (Mike Mogar, who works at Kilian’s in Chestnut Hill) and Fern (Dee Watson) are not to be outdone. They are divorced and plan to remarry different lovers. But before taking new vows, they tryst one last time. Have you guessed that their intendeds, Dawn (Kathy Mitchell-Poli) and Henry (Dennis Cullen), show up?

With farcical fare of this sort, everything hangs on performance, and this production benefits from splendid acting throughout. Special kudos must go to the kooky female leads. As the prima donna Daisy, Heidi Leigh Hanson all but steals the show. Both her sense of timing and her body language are riotously funny. As Miranda, Ia Ioannidou is equally fine. With her delightful Slavic accent, she is comically self-possessed, purposeful and dotty at the same time.

The characters we meet in the first act do not really know each other. But when act two takes place 20 years later, they all get to meet. For different reasons, all assemble to celebrate a wedding. It is the same hotel room. Only the nicely coordinated colors of the bedclothes have changed.

Though disjointed as individuals, their lives are weirdly interlacing. “Marriage” in the sense of a profound connectedness to the other turns out to be an unavoidable life condition. It is in this almost unrecognizable way, family values come to slyly triumph in the end.

The Old Academy Players is located at 3544 Indian Queen Lane in East Falls. Return Engagements will play through June 26. For reservations, call 215-843-1109.