Review: STAGE OF FOOLS at Seattle Public Theater

Dear Readers, I love a good farce.  Those door slammers with a controlled chaos as people try and get out of ridiculous situations.  But they’re not easy to pull off.  Sadly, the current offering from Seattle Public Theater, the world premiere of Joy McCullough’s “Stage of Fools”, doesn’t quite manage it.  With some forced dialog and a handful of jokes beaten to death, literally, this uphill slog for laughs feels like unfocused and uncontrolled chaos, making it just chaos.

We center on the denizens of The Front Theater, an all-female theater group that presents new works from female artists.  But times are tough and the NEA grants they were counting on have dried up, and so they may be forced to close.  But the artistic director Michelle (Kate Jaeger) is presented with an offer too good to pass up.  80’s action movie star Jake Stone (Charles R. Leggett) is willing to give them an insane amount of money, enough to buy the theater and more, to mount a production of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” with himself in the lead role.  A horrifying prospect for this feminist collective, a play by an old white guy, starring an old white guy, but they only need to make it through one performance, and the money is theirs.  But with this blow hard misogynist in the mix, things go from awkward, to unbearable to catastrophic when an accident on opening night forces the ladies to, well, “Weekend at Bernie’s” Jake to get through the show.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the show does have a few good laughs.  But the problem, or rather one of the problems is, that they take those same laughs and beat them into the ground until they’re not funny anymore.  The misogyny bit is funny a few times.  The frantic women putting up with the blowhard is funny a few times.  And the puppeteering of a corpse is funny a few times.  But it’s all the show is riding on and so becomes old. 

Furthermore, the script, specifically the dialog in the script, doesn’t feel natural.  It feels like forced exposition which can kill a show.  I’ve seen one other of McCullough’s works in town, which I loved, so I was excited for this one, but left disappointed.  And speaking of forced, for some reason director Amy Poisson felt the need to have the humor forced as well, as the jokes in the piece weren’t allowed to happen, but were repeatedly presented up as “this is the joke”.  Farce is funny when the antics and situations feel natural, not when they’re shoved into your face.  And as everyone in the cast seemed on the same level of forced, I can only assume it was a directorial choice. 

Then there were the technical aspects of the show which all felt half-assed and clunky.  The physical comedy felt under choreographed and under rehearsed, the mini speaker playing all of Jake’s lines was so muffled that the audience strained to hear it, leaving no room for laughs, and the radio-controlled rat, just kept falling over.

The cast does what they can but even stellar veterans like Jaeger and Leggett feel overdone and under prepared.  And with bits that were introduced and then abandoned and an ending that left me with the feeling of “oh, it’s over?” this piece feels underbaked and needs some more time in the oven.  And so, with my three-letter rating system, I give Seattle Public Theater’s production of “Stage of Fools” a let down chuckle of a MEH-.  With another super professional and tested farce about a doomed performance in town, it just shone a spotlight on what this show didn’t have, controlled chaos and a litany of bits and jokes keeping that chaos fresh, plus the ability to let the humor happen naturally. 

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