FORT WORTH 鈥� 鈥檚 ability to tame her wild imagination into coherent narratives anyone can relate to has made her not only popular with theater companies but also an in-demand writer of series television.
of her widely produced play The 贬补迟尘补办别谤鈥檚 Wife is the latest example of how Yee strikes a credible balance between crowd-pleasing entertainment and a deeper look at the human condition.
A comedy with serious undertones about the nature of relationships, 贬补迟尘补办别谤鈥檚 is structured as a story-within-a-story with gently applied supernatural elements as the glue. The wall talks. Pages of text fall from the ceiling. Eventually, a goofy golem shows up.
A young couple (Sky Williams and Jon Garrard) is moving into their first house. They joke about its modesty. Boxes sit haphazardly in the living room. A couch stands on its side. Before they鈥檙e introduced, an older man (Randy Pearlman) clutches a hat, raising it to his head with a sigh. Enter his long-suffering wife (Krista Scott) and best friend and neighbor (Patrick Bynane).
The audience鈥檚 view is partially blocked by window frames in front of the stage suggesting we鈥檙e privy to intimacies that don鈥檛 often see the light of day. But like Hetchman, the puttering, dissatisfied hatmaker of the title, we鈥檝e all struggled to locate the TV remote. To comic effect, he manages to pick it up with a metal grabber.
鈥淗ave you seen my hat?鈥� he inquires in a thick Eastern European accent.
鈥淵ou think I look at you every day,鈥� his wife retorts in the specifically similar tones of 20th-century Jewish immigrants.
Williams, whose character is a copy editor of safety manuals, follows the action as pages of the Hetchmans鈥� story begin dropping into her hands. She can see the couple. Her boyfriend Gabe, a schoolteacher, cannot. Whooshing sounds signal the arrival of this strangely comic dimension.
It鈥檚 the bittersweet tale of a lost fedora and the owner鈥檚 wife who goes on the hunt for her own, mirroring the less overt tension between the young couple now occupying the Hetchman home.
As she begins her off-stage journey, Mrs. Hetchman rolls out of the fireplace with the missing hat, a cloud of fog trailing her like a train leaving the station on a winter morning. It鈥檚 funny because the supernatural is rendered with such low-tech effects.
But despite the magical twists, the plot is grounded in the ordinary. The play even feels lighthearted 鈥� including a talking wall (Daniel Ruelas) that Hetchman and his friend Meckel are aware of 鈥� until it doesn鈥檛. Yee鈥檚 script and the direction from Circle artistic director Ashley H. White hint at the darker aspects of the characters鈥� relationships. They have secrets from each other that will eventually emerge.
Seen at the production鈥檚 last preview before opening night, the cast is uniformly believable. But Scott鈥檚 character, quietly stewing under an engulfing wig, glasses and frumpy clothing, stands out. Bynane鈥檚 chatty, upbeat Meckel also charms. The comedy grows with the arrival of a ratty version of a resourceful golem portrayed by Garrard before a darker shift in tone.
When Yee closes the circle between the two couples with a paranormal occurrence near the end of The 贬补迟尘补办别谤鈥檚 Wife, it鈥檚 hard to swallow. It鈥檚 not a happy ending but more of an attempt at a plausible explanation for why these people have been drawn together. Yee and Circle have created an amusing, otherworldly scenario that also comments on the difficulties of loving the people closest to you.
Details
Through May 10 at 230 W. Fourth St., Fort Worth. $40-$45. .
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