"The Underpants," Little Fish Theatre, San Pedro, CA
Carl Sternheim’s The Underpants, adapted by Steve Martin and directed by Melanie Jones for the Little Fish Theatre isn’t a Freudian slip but it sure made me iddy with joy.
It’s a funny adaptation of a hilarious script. The costumes are period-perfect but the dialogue – and the images (sausages figure mightily) – are dive bar tawdry and off-color.
It’s a lighthearted look at a serious topic: the hypocritical, second-class status of women.
It’s set in Dusseldorf in 1910; if it were set in Palm Springs in 2007 at Easter Break, it would be no big deal. Louise Maske (Sarah McKenna), dreamer, not exactly a Martha Stewart wannabe, married for one year to Theo (Eldon Cline), public servant to the King (Art Krispin), manages to lose her bloomers.
The problem is, she’s in public, surrounded by subjects of the King as he makes a royal procession; she’s uncommonly attractive and would attract attention even without the wardrobe malfunction; it occasions a lot of comedic follow-through by horny herren.
The Maskes are comfortable but not well off; that’s why Theo allegedly won’t consummate the marriage: lack of funds to raise a kid. That’s also why they take in two boarders, Frank Versati (Bill Wolski), a poet, a dreamer like Louise, and Benjamin Cohen (Carsten Spencer), a Floyd-esque barber and, of all things, an anti-Semite Jew.
Both are not there for the cramped room they have to share; they’re not there for Louise’s paltry efforts at cooking; they’re there for one thing and one thing only: proximity to Louise whose reputation (deshabille ergo wanton) preceded her.
With the counsel of upstairs neighbor Gertrude Deuter (Madeleine Drake), love-starved Louise hatches a plan of seduction; we learn from Gertrude that Theo wasn’t all that sacrosanct himself. The two boarders leave, another one, Klinglehoff (Duke Schneider) arrives, and things get hopelessly funny; and then the King himself inquires for that room to let.
The performances were spot on. The actors kept that formal edge, occasioned in part, I’m sure, by those layers of clothes, which in turn made the salacious bits all the more funny. McKenna’s Louise was dreamy-eyed and lyrical, giddy like a songbird at the prospect of a fling with a poet.
Cline’s Theo was so starchy you could hear him creak when he moved. He was so far removed from Louise in posture, attitude, and register that you wonder how they got married in the first place.
Hats off to Drake’s Deuter: eager for gossip, eager for adventure, albeit secondhand, her energetic machinations at seduction and betrayal were like a polka that kept the whole thing together.
And bravo to the bloomerettes Wolski and Spencer: each as different as could be with one notable exception: an indiscrete, indecorous id focused in on its object of desire. Excellent!
Performances are 8 pm, Friday & Saturday, 7 pm, Sunday. The play runs until May 26. Tickets are $18-20. The Theatre is located at 777 Centre Street, San Pedro. For more information call (310) 512-6030 or visit www.littlefishtheatre.org.
