Tuesday, October 26, 2010

UMKC "Black Comedy/White Liars" review by Piddums

As Different as Black and White
Rating: 4

Black Comedy/The White Liars
UMKC Theatre

Black Comedy is an often produced play from the Peter Schaeffer catalog and an oddity from that author. Not concerned with those touched by God and the men who envy them (essentially the plots of Equus, Amadeus and The Royal Hunt of the Sun), Black Comedy is a farce. Brinsley Miller and his debutante fiance are holding a party to show his art pieces and also meet his fiance's military father. They've borrowed his neighbor's prized antique collection without permission to impress their guests and are waiting when the building is sent into blackout. The unexpected appearances of the neighbor and an ex girlfriend complicate matters with Brinsley spiriting the furniture out of the apartment and hiding the angry ex in the upstairs bedroom.

Schaffer uses the convention that when the room is lit in the play, the stage is in blackness and when the room is in blackness the stage is brightly lit. The pace is wonderful in this production and the cast is so uniformly good that I find it hard to single anyone out, but I absolutely must mention Virginia Hubbard as another neighbor with a secret drinking problem and J. Will Fritz as the flamboyant antique owning neighbor who may or may not have had a relationship with Brinsley himself.

The White Liars is a lesser known Shaeffer play, which is done mostly as a companion piece to Black Comedy as it originally was done on The West End and Broadway. The reason that it's lesser known and often omitted is because it's dreadful. The story of a fortune teller and two customers who all have secrets is jam packed with bloviating monologues which seem endless. The cast of three are quite charming and do their best, but there is no raising of this corpse.

Five out of Five for Black Comedy. Two out of five for the White Liars.

read the review at KC Stage

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