HILARITY HAMMERED HOME,
OR AN HEIR TO MISFORTUNE
The tone is set from the start: The Heir Apparent begins with a chamber pot being emptied from a balcony window. It answers a question not worth posing: Can David (Venus in Fur) Ives stoop to conquer? (A patently rhetorical question for this gentleman’s guide to lust and torpor.)
Okay, say that you silently carry within you an unappeasable zest for groaner puns, scatological wordplay, mind-boggling anachronisms, manic mugging (in both senses of the word), sight gags, double takes, tedious raillery, corpse humor, audience-interactive buffoonery, and endless jokes about farts, stool, testicles, and “matrimoney.” Good news: You don’t need an intervention, just Ives’s chronically comic, pathologically off-color The Heir Apparent, now convulsing crowds at Chicago’s Navy Pier.
Based on the rather unknown comedy Le Légataire universel by the obscure Jean-François Regnard, this heavy-handed, obsessively crude drawing-room comedy, staged by Tony-winner John Rando, is curiously played in Kevin Depinet’s sumptuous 18th–century salon. But the vaudevillian patter is strictly early 21st century with allusions to Godzilla, Weekends at Bernie’s, brand names, trends and memes. Everything new is old again.
For all of Ives’s persiflage, badinage, and forced rhymes, what’s missing in action is any trace of wit. Revealingly, the evening’s biggest laugh comes from the play’s final moral: “If people hope you died, you have fucked up.”
As with Ives’s Moliere travesty The School for Lies (which also suffered from insufferable overkill and an ugly desperation to please), Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s two-hour tour-de-yuck follows the reliable formulae of mistaken identities, rapid-fire costume changes, idiotic imposture, graphic incongruities, rapid reversals, and toxic twists. It centers on the title character Eraste (rubber-faced Nate Burger), an impecunious young dreamer who’s desperate to marry his beloved Isabelle (Emily Peterson, the ingénue from hell). That means making himself the sole inheritor of his miser geezer uncle Geronte (Paxton Whitehead), a cynosure of diarrhea, flatulence, swoons, and constipation.
Getting Geronte’s gold is the non-negotiable requirement for Isabelle’s dragon-lady mother Madame Argante (imperious Linda Kimbrough) to consent to the alliance. Aiding frenzied Eraste and much-menaced Isabelle (who the 69-year old Geronte wants to wed) in their merry machinations are amorous and wily servants Crispin (mischievous Cliff Saunders) and Lisette (sprightly Jessie Fisher). The butt of assorted jokes about his lack of height, Patrick Kerr thanklessly plays — on his aching knees — the hideously bewigged, vertically challenged lawyer Scuple, an apparent gull for everyone as he pens the all-important will that will determine Eraste’s fate.
The synopsis is a Bermuda Triangle into which this review will not be sucked. But even in plotting Ives falls short of, if not the unseen Regnard, then his hilarious contemporaries Pierre Marivaux, Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais, John Gay, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Oliver Goldsmith. They wrote jokes whose punchlines did not goose the genitals.
After a plethora of burlesque plotting (including slams at short and old people and the sniggering smarminess of sex to delight the most discerning Internet troll), the outcome improbably hangs on a sudden attack of goodness from the very stereotypes — snobs, greedsters, fogies — who Ives has mocked into contemptuous absurdity for five-sixths of the play. It doesn’t wash.
We’re left with slick and deft comic turns by a superb septet of flawlessly side-slitting jesters. No question, Rando’s ensemble can sell Ives’s shtick. They scream splendidly, which for this romp is the height, breadth and depth of the art of acting. But to see on this stage a stellar thespian like Paxton Whitehead is like discovering a diamond in a dumpster. How have the mighty (prat)fallen!
photos by Liz Lauren
The Heir Apparent
Chicago Shakespeare Theater
Courtyard Theater on Navy Pier
ends on January 17, 2016
for tickets, call 312.595.5600 or visit Chicago Shakes
for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago
