A polished production of ‘Perfect Nonsense’

Clockwise from top left, From left, Jason Guy as Jeeves, Will DeVary as Bertie Wooster and Mark Edward Lang as a shopkeeper. Mark Edward Lang as Aunt Dahlia, seeker of the cow creamer. Will DeVary as Bertie Wooster, Jason Guy as Jeeves. Mark Edward Lang as an increasingly tall Roderick Spode, with Will DeVary as Bertie Wooster.  DAVID ABDELNOUR PHOTOS/BEDFORD PHOTO-GRAPHIC

The laughs and costume changes keep coming

By DAVID POGUE

In theory, you’ve had three chances to meet Bertie Wooster, the slightly dim British aristocrat, and Jeeves, his unflappable, preternaturally competent butler. 

You might have encountered them in the 46 novels and stories by P.G. Wodehouse that featured them. (Yes, that’s where we got the trope of a butler named Jeeves.) You might have seen the BBC TV series, starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. Or there’s a tiny chance that you saw a 2013 stage play by brothers David and Robert Goodale called “Perfect Nonsense.” (I’m not even counting the 1975 insta-flop musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, “By Jeeves.”)

Now you have another chance, and it’s worth grabbing. The Schoolhouse Theater’s polished production of “Perfect Nonsense” is running until Dec. 21 in Croton Falls.

The story, if you can call it that, concerns Bertie Wooster’s efforts to assist his Aunt Dahlia in obtaining an 18th century cow creamer from an antique store. (“It’s a sort of cream jug, Bertie. It looks exactly like a cow, but smaller, of course, and made of silver.”) She’s hoping that Bertie will visit the shop and make disparaging remarks about the creamer, in hopes that the proprietor will lower the price a bit. 

Oh, there’s a subplot about Bertie’s efforts to patch up the relationship of the drippy Madeline with her fiancé; if he doesn’t, she’ll try to marry him (Bertie), and we can’t have that! Fortunately, the loyal Jeeves is always on hand to untangle whatever mess Bertie makes.

Two things make the comedy work. First, of course, there’s the lunacy of the characters and their dopey upper-class twit lifestyles. I mean, they have names like Roderick Spode, Sir Watkyn Bassett and Gussie Fink-Nottle. Shakespeare it ain’t.

Second — and here’s the big one — there’s the fact that all 12 characters onstage are played by only three actors. 

We’ve all seen shows where one actor doubles a role, of course. And at the outset of “Perfect Nonsense,” the double duty seems reasonable enough. Someone exits and comes back a scene later wearing different clothes. So far, so normal.

But as the play percolates along, the gaps between actors’ reappearances begin to shorten. It’s funny enough when Jason Guy, who plays Jeeves, must leave the stage and come back in a new costume with only seconds to spare.

But when he’s forced to play two characters simultaneously in the same scene, sometimes switching genders on the fly from one line of dialogue to the next, it’s hilarious. In one fantastic scene, suddenly realizing that he’ll have to play Madeline, he improvises her costume by grabbing a lampshade and a lacy tablecloth from the set. Guy, an impeccable actor with years of Shakespeare under his belt, gives each of his characters a distinct voice, posture, gait and hairpiece.

For his part, Mark Edward Lang plays six characters, including a butler, an aunt, and budding dictator Roderick Spode, which turns his frenzied costume and wig changes into a sideshow of their own. As Bertie makes steadily exaggerated references to Spode’s height, Lang is forced to use increasingly unwieldy props — a stepstool, a ladder — to accommodate the description. At one point, he’s forced to replace himself onstage with a mannequin. 

Seeing Lang and Guy commit to the bit with such highly choreographed precision is worth the ticket price right there.

Will DeVary, as Bertie Wooster, has only one character to play: Bertie Wooster. (Well, one and a half. As the show’s narrator, he occasionally steps out of his within-the-play character to bring us up to speed on important exposition.)

He’s well cast and does a fine job, but director Owen Thompson has made the play’s only miscalculation by saddling him with clownish physical comedy bits: wildly exaggerated double takes, implausible mugging and unmotivated windmill-arm walks. It makes the show’s first 10 minutes fairly unfunny; at the performance I watched, the audience’s reaction to these exertions was crickets. 

The thing is, Bertie is funny enough as written.  (“She spoke, as usual, as if she was shouting across ploughed fields in a high wind,” he says of one character.) He’d be better off as the straight man for the other, much funnier characters.

Even so, the play gets funnier and more absurd as the nonsense accelerates and all three characters scramble to keep up. Actually, four: Isabelle Favette’s low-fi but charmingly hand-drawn set pieces pull off their own high-speed shenanigans. A library wall spins to become a drawing room, then sprouts a tablecloth-covered banquette that, by hiding an actor, becomes an essential player in his ability to play two characters in the same scene.

“Perfect Nonsense” is a trifle, a piece of British fluff; what makes it delicious is the immediacy of these professional, actor’s-union performers, unmiked and close enough to hit with a paper airplane. For two hours, you’re transported to 1938 upper-class England at its silliest— and in the darkness of this American December, that may be just the journey you need.

The Schoolhouse Theater is located at 3 Owens Road, Croton Falls. For tickets and more information, visit theschoolhousetheater.org.