Two-Timing

Two plays, one cast of characters. That’s the tricky problem of House and Garden, the simultaneous double bill of Alan Ayckbourn comedies currently running 14 actors gloriously ragged on the two stages at Theatre Three.

Upstairs, the House residents, dashing around a rambling pile of bricks in the British countryside, are embroiled in several noisy crises. Teddy Platt, heir to a centuries-old family curse (Platt wives go splat in the oddest ways), expects an important visitor to ask him to run for a seat in Parliament. But Teddy, played with sexy bluster by T3 regular J. Brent Alford, is hardly fit for public scrutiny. He's not-so-secretly boffing Joanna, wife of his best friend, Dr. Giles Mace, whose house sits just beyond the Platts' back garden.

Wise to her husband's indiscretion, Trish Platt has shut down emotionally. She treats her husband like Mr. Cellophane, telling callers she hasn't seen him in days, even when he's standing a few feet away. Daughter Sally is onto dad's canoodling too, and so is the Maces' teenage son Jake, a lanky lad in full schoolboy crush mode for snappy Sally.

Below stairs, the servants are swept up in other tawdry dilemmas. Izzy the cook is shagging gardener Warn Coucher (great names here), who occasionally plows the furrows of Izzy's lazy but luscious daughter Pearl, a maid with a thing for older men, including Giles Mace.

Everyone's in a tizzy about something, not just sexual dalliances. There's a celebrity, French film star Lucille Cadeau, arriving for a fancy luncheon at the Platts' and serving as grand marshal at the village fête. The annual outdoor carnival, held on the Platt estate, is ripe for disaster, certain to be spoiled by rain, sabotage (what's Warn doing with that mower?) or some ill-timed drunken rutting in a certain fortuneteller's tent.

If House sags under its cumbersome layers of exposition—like most overlong comedies, even its best gags go moldy after two hours—then Garden makes up for it. All the fun in Ayckbourn's interlocking plays happens outdoors, played by the flower-festooned environs of the smaller Theatre Too space, where the estate's lawn, gazebo and sputtering fountain are placed.

Pause to consider the physical logistics of these remarkably slick productions. Every time actors in House head out the French doors of the Platt manse, they must race from the main stage at Theatre Three, through the lobby and down the 33 steep steps to Theatre Too, where Garden is performed. Then they go back up again and back down again and up and down and up and down for 150 minutes. Stage managers of each show keep stopwatches ticking and headphones buzzing with cues for who's supposed to be where when. If one show falls off schedule, there are built-in stretchers, such as Teddy's interactions with an ill-behaved (and unseen) hound named Spoof, and Joanna's solo rehearsals of her confession to husband Giles. The most "crosses" in each dual performance are by actor Andrew Phifer. As Jake Mace, Phifer, a recent Austin College grad, pops in and out of each play eight times a night. At least Ayckbourn had the wisdom to exercise the stamina of the scripts' youngest character.

Theatergoers can see one or both plays (at separate performances) and come away with a sense of the whole shebang, but there are odd bits that are made clear only by sitting through the five total hours of House and Garden. For its nearly nonstop comedy, Garden definitely is the better of the two. Actress Marisa Diotalevi, who appears briefly upstairs, dominates the downstairs play as her character Joanna's love life unravels. When Joanna complains to Teddy that their extramarital couplings occur primarily in "summer houses, potting sheds, gazebos...ditches," he ditches her. That sends Joanna over the edge, or hedge in this case. Diotalevi, the finest physical comedian in Dallas theater, is Lucy-goosey (as in Ball) as she falls, crawls and sprawls all over the leafy scenery (designed by David Walsh and Jac Alder). The sight of Diotalevi peeping through the wall of ivy, mad as a March hare, is staggeringly silly.

Likewise, Emily Gray, playing the visiting French diva as a humpy hybrid of Catherine Deneuve and Courtney Love, gets to go into a comedic frenzy as her character grows drunker and more brazenly sexual by the minute. Her sloppy seduction of Teddy in Garden—done all in French—brings the house and part of the set down.

More subdued in their courtship are the teens, played by Phifer and Maxey Whitehead (as Teddy's daughter Sally), who've bonded over and been wounded by their parents' affair. These actors are in their 20s, but they make believable, sweet kids. Director Bruce R. Coleman has steered the focus of several scenes toward Jake and Sally, who are beautifully portrayed and come across as more sensible and likable than their elders.