Review of Boeing Boeing, starring Mark Rylance in the New York Times:
May 5, 2008
THEATER REVIEW | 'BOEING-BOEING'
Up, Up and Away (and Watch Those Swinging Doors)
By BEN BRANTLEY
“Boeing Boeing,” a creaky French comedy that has been given the makeover of the season by the director Matthew Warchus, has no earthly right to be as funny as it is. I mean, think about it. A loud slapstick romp about a roué with three mistresses, born from the middle-class side of the Smirky ’60s, that might as well be called “Too Many Stewardesses” (though “Boeing Boeing” is winceable enough)? Ugh.
New Yorkers turned up their noses the first time this Marc Camoletti farce came to town in 1965, and it lasted on Broadway for a mere 23 performances. Never mind that they loved it in London, where it ran for seven years. The British have an annoying weakness for such things. You know, shows with titles like “Run for Your Wife.”
The production that opened Sunday night at the newly refurbished Longacre Theater is tricked out in thoroughly Mod ’60s style, but this latest edition of a play named for an aircraft soars right out of its time zone and into some unpolluted stratosphere of classic physical comedy. Propelled by the same gusty spirit that animated Commedia dell’Arte and the silent films of Keaton, Chaplin and Lloyd, the happy cast led by Mark Rylance, Bradley Whitford and Christine Baranski may be earthy, but it’s seldom earthbound.
Here’s the setup (and bear with me). Bernard (Mr. Whitford), an American businessman living in Paris, is juggling love affairs with three air hostesses (as they were called back in the day), who touch down briefly but lovingly in his apartment between flights. There’s Gloria (Kathryn Hahn), the American; Gabriella (Gina Gershon), the Italian; and Gretchen (Mary McCormack), the German.
Thanks to Bernard’s keen study of flight schedules and the efficiency of his grumbling Gallic housekeeper, Berthe (Ms. Baranski), his three mistresses have no inkling of one another’s existences. But collision is clearly in the cards. And on hand, to survey and sink into the resulting complications, is the unworldly Robert (Mr. Rylance, the British actor who starred in the London revival, in a priceless deadpan performance), Bernard’s boyhood friend, newly arrived from Wisconsin and as green as a Granny Smith apple.
Most people, on reading this synopsis, would see only period prurience, caked with unappetizing mold. (It feels appropriate that a film version starring Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis was publicized as “the big comedy of nineteen-sexty-sex.”) But Mr. Warchus, a British director known here for his lucid Broadway productions of Yasmina Reza’s “Art” and Sam Shepard’s “True West,” has X-ray vision that zeroes in on the bone structure of a play.
“Boeing Boeing,” it turns out, has great bones. “It’s geometrical,” says Bernard, explaining his impeccably organized love life to Robert. “So precise as to be almost poetic.” The same might be said of Mr. Warchus’s mise-en-scène, which keeps us perpetually tuned into the idea of a geometry and its attendant equations.
That Euclidean spirit is translated most visibly into Rob Howell’s inspired set and costumes. Bertrand’s high-ceilinged apartment has curved walls and many doors that you know will all be swinging wildly before the evening ends. Suspended from the ceiling are three decorative globes, each in a different color to match the uniform (and crucially, the flight bag) of each of Bertrand’s lovers. And that’s just the most obvious manifestation of the precise color coding. (Love the red, yellow and blue roses.)
This bright, formulaically arranged environment matches the play’s tidy structure, a reassuring framework for all the untidy behavior that occurs within it. (That’s partly why you don’t feel that unpleasant “oh no” anxiety that is often induced by farce.) It allows the cast members to cut loose like preschoolers on the playground of their dreams. And like fond parents, we can enjoy their shenanigans while knowing that the slides and swing sets are too well-made for anyone to get seriously hurt.
Their performances are among the most one-dimensional and stereotyped that have ever shown up on a Broadway stage - and that’s a large part of their roaring success. Gloria, Gabriella and Gretchen bring to mind fantasy drawings from a vintage Esquire or Playboy for a portfolio of international dream girls.
And Ms. Hahn, Ms. Gershon and Ms. McCormack broadly but artfully exploit the most shameless nationalist clichés: the take-charge, health-obsessed American; the sentimental, lusty Italian; and, most hilariously, the dominating but thin-skinned German.
Ms. Baranski’s Berthe is a chic, black-clad philosopher, a French existentialist maid who loves nothing more than to complain. As for the guys, no matter how much they believe they’re running the show, they’re really uncomprehending men in a world where estrogen is always stronger than testosterone. (This version, by the way, turns Bernard and Robert from Frenchmen into Americans in Paris.)
At the performance I saw, the ensemble began a tad shakily, and I wondered if I had been a fool to enjoy the play as much as I did when I saw it in London last year. But as the show progressed, everyone shed self-consciousness and found a shared rhythm. The second act was unconditional bliss.
“Boeing Boeing,” translated by Beverley Cross and Francis Evans, is not a play you quote from. It’s not what people say but how they move, from Bernard’s dancing hipster’s walk (which owes a debt to Steve Martin) to Ms. McCormack’s glorious Olympian strut and wide-legged, take-no-prisoners stance. Mr. Rylance, whom I know mostly as a Shakespearean actor (and as the first artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe in London), here exercises a supremely graceful clumsiness and hang-dog cheer that evokes the great Buster Keaton.
Though the performers have specific stage presence to burn, their characters are ultimately as abstract as figures in a ballet. The chemistry they generate among one another is less erotic than kinetic, despite scenes that involve blows to the groin, horizontal wrestling and tonsil hockey. (Watch Mr. Rylance probe his mouth to see if his tongue is still in place after receiving a high-suction kiss.)
You see, the appeal of “Boeing Boeing” is the very opposite of what you might expect. It’s not smutty at all. It’s deliciously, deliriously innocent. I haven’t felt so much like a child, while watching a sex comedy, since I was, well, a very young child, taken by his mother to the Billy Wilder movie “Some Like It Hot.”
Like Wilder’s masterpiece this production levitates low burlesque into high comedy. In a generous act of alchemy Mr. Warchus and company have distilled pure pleasure from an impure source.
BOEING-BOEING
By Marc Camoletti, translated from the French by Beverley Cross and Francis Evans; directed by Matthew Warchus; sets and costumes by Rob Howell; lighting by Hugh Vanstone; music by Claire Van Kampen; sound by Simon Baker; stage manager, William Joseph Barnes. Presented by Sonia Friedman Productions, Bob Boyett, Act Productions, Matthew Byam Shaw, Robert G. Bartner, the Weinstein Company, Susan Gallin/Mary Lu Roffe, Broadway Across America, Tulchin/Jenkins/DSM and the Araca Group. Longacre Theater, 220 West 48th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
WITH: Christine Baranski (Berthe), Mark Rylance (Robert), Bradley Whitford (Bernard), Gina Gershon (Gabriella), Kathryn Hahn (Gloria) and Mary McCormack (Gretchen).
Translation from the French by Beverley Cross? Is that the same man who was Dame Maggie's late husband (and St. Toby's late stepfather?)
Also, a great story and interview with Mark Rylance can be found in the May 5th issue of The New Yorker. The complete story isn't on line yet, but you can probably still find this issue on news stands.