Audience overflows with laughter in riotous 'What the Butler Saw'

A set with lots of doors. How many times in just a few years have we been watching sets with lots of doors? You know what I mean: those shows overflowing with lost identities, discovered British accents, innuendo and more miscommunication than "Friends."

I guess we've been steeped in them since Plautus, but it seems that Princeton University in recent years has created its own Renaissance of the classic comic farce. From "Hay Fever" in 1998 to "Noises Off" this fall, choreographing hilarity is a Princeton standard. Now, even McCarter Theatre is in the mix with Richard Brinsley Sheridan's "School for Scandal." We eat it up. Farce means comic gold.

But in "What the Butler Saw," now playing at 185 Nassau St., Joe Orton didn't just write a farce — he wrote a farce of farce. Now for all you humanities majors out there, that means comic gold to the power of two. (It's true – I did it on a calculator). And Tomoko Minami '01's senior thesis production of the 1969 hit is no less than exponentially uproarious.

In traditional farce, the laughs come from mistaken identity, double meanings and missed connections that result in petty foul-ups. In Joe Orton's world, however, the audience is left rolling in the aisles by cross-dressing, sexual assault,and three bottles of Chivas Regal that result, ultimately, in gunshots.

Written in the now unfamiliar era of free speech, free love and free thought, the play bounds through social stigma after social stigma while the plot seems never to become twisted enough. Human rights, homophobia, psychology,and reason are only a few of the issues that Orton lampoons, very stinging in today's conservative state.

Minami stages her thesis production with brilliant choreography and extraordinary precision. With characters continually running on and off stage and comic timing always held in the balance of a costume change and an explosive entrance, the director must be painstakingly exact. And she is.

The extensive preparatory rehearsal is immediately apparent in the comic timing of all six actors in the play, as they proceed rapid-fire for a full two hours. Indeed, the only character more spent than the actors onstage is the audience, exhausted from non-stop laughter.

With immaculate precision of choreography and mostly impeccable comic delivery, the cast of "What the Butler Saw" really delivers. Susan Schaefer '01, who off stage proclaims herself not an actress, is fabulously contemptuous as Mrs. Prentice, the nymphomaniac wife of Dr. Prentice (Charlie Hewson '04), an honest doctor who is simply trying to cover up his sexual assaults.

Hewson, building to a sweat within the first 10 minutes of comic panic, miraculously survives the endurance role of Prentice, and proves himself without a doubt to be the rising theatre star.

Kathleen Amshoff, a Minami discovery from McCarter Theatre, is perfectly cast as the young naïve, while Jesse Liebman '03 is baffled wonderfully as the police sergeant trying to keep the peace.

Joined by Princeton stage veterans Nick Ordway '02 and Lee Spangler '01 — whose depraved characters are joyfully oblivious — the cast has no weak link, and each actor feeds off the others' energies for an exhilarating performance.

The most exquisite set that we have seen in a long while is the fitting backdrop for a comedy of errors that extends the boundaries of typical manners comedy. Allie Tepper '01 has created, along with a fabulous crew of builders, the beautiful and detailed study of Dr. Prentice.

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With skylights, rounded walls, bookcases and, of course, five sets of doors and a curtain, the set for this farce has all the required elements for a traditional sitting room farce. Soon, we find that it is much more. Tepper has including everything and the kitchen sink — as Geraldine Barclay waits naked behind the curtain, Prentice opens a set of double doors to find none other than a pull-out, working sink. To emphasize the play's departure from traditional literature, even the bookcases prove to be fronts for a coat closet and an ice box, from which Mrs. Prentice draws liberally.

In my Princeton career, I have always made it a point to go to senior thesis productions, simply because I believe they are better. Minami certainly does not disappoint in her venture, and I wholeheartedly recommend "What the Butler Saw." In a long line of farces, this tops the list.