Stage

Flashback to the Future

Appleseed performers feast on the time-warped premise of Communicating Doors

By James MacKillop

It’s the greatest community theater entrance of the year. Poopay Daysir arrives as an on-order companion of the evening. Topped with a Lorelei Lee blonde wig and leopard cape, shod in stiletto-heeled high boots, and clad in skin-tight black leather she reveals a Playmate-ready silhouette: slender thighs and washboard tummy. Speaking in the Eliza Doolittle tones of the London street, she tells us she’s a dominatrix because the regular girl was unavailable. Our eyes glance incredulously to the program to see that Poopay is being portrayed by otherwise soft-spoken Anne Fitzgerald, seen most often as reassuring mothers, a redheaded version of June Lockhart or Barbara Billingsley. Whoa! This production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Communicating Doors is signaling us to be prepared for surprises.

Holy allegory!: From left, Navzad N. Dabu, Joe Pierce, and Jane Garlow in Appleseed’s The Diviners.

Although flying under the aegis of Appleseed Productions, which again holds court at the Atonement Lutheran Church, 116 W. Glen Ave., Doors represents yet another British comedy from a coterie of pals, such as director Dan Stevens and his wife Nora O’Dea, Fitzgerald and her husband Roy vanNorstrand, and others. They clearly love the material, and they know how to do the accents. Earlier productions, like Joe Orton’s pitch-black comedies or breathless-paced farces, were harder to pull off. Alan Ayckbourn comedies make a for better fit, in part because all shows open with a small-town company composed of friends who are used to bouncing off each other and delight in going against type, like Fitzgerald’s Poopay.

Communicating Doors opened in Scarborough in February 1994. Time is important to the action. In the first scene we see a large calendar on a door announcing the year “2028,” even though everyone, including Poopay, is in contemporary dress. We quickly find that the man who has hired her, Reece Welles (Roy vanNorstrand), is not interested in her usual professional services but instead wants her to witness a document outlining the horrendous deeds he has committed in a lifetime, including the murder of two wives. He’s gray and wheezing and claims to be near death.

The lack of interest on the part of Britishers in Poopay’s services (tools of the trade are in her purse) is an ongoing gag in the first act, along with Poopay’s always announcing her line of work in falling cadences, as if she really gave pedicures. She’s a smart girl, though, and soon recognizes that knowledge of the confession puts her in danger. So she hides in a closet, which Reece’s bullet-headed henchman Julian (Rick Signorelli) tells us is no route to escape.

Only it is. In the well-oiled set [designed] by William Edward White, what appears to be a closet rotates on its axis, with translucent screens on the side so we can see in as it turns. As it rotates we hear futuristic music, possibly rejected by a Flash Gordon serial or an early draft of The Twilight Zone. Both sides of the closet taken together are the “Communicating Doors” of the title. When Poopay re-enters the set she looks the same, but on the door behind her is pasted a calendar with the enlarged date, “2008.” And here Poopay meets a well-bred blonde named Ruella (Nora O’Dea), Reece’s first wife, on the date his confession says she was to be murdered.

Once we’re returned to the present, Reece reappears looking chipper and much less gray and annoyed that a tawdry stranger like Poopay is in the apartment. Present also is an officious but oblivious house detective named Harold (David J. Hubert), with gray hair and a balloon-shaped torso. In partial response to the danger presented to her, Ruella enters the communicating doors and is transported to 1988 where, in the very same apartment, she finds her partially clad husband, now looking positively boyish, frolicking with the barefoot nymph Jessica (Jennifer DeCook), who turns out to be Reece’s first wife. House detective Harold has shrunk to a sleek young man. VanNorstrand, incidentally, shaved his in-life grayish beard to allow his character to shed 40 years.

Ayckbourn would never be confused with Agatha Christie, but any attempts to rewrite history are bound to bring unexpected, even unwanted, consequences. This means that plot twists and reversals cannot be revealed. What can be relayed are some of the plot fillips that Ayckbourn inserts to delight audiences along the way. For example, house detective Harold, always on the wrong track, thinks that Poopay and first wife Jessica are lesbian lovers. So he’s sure he understands what’s really going on when he encounters Poopay and Jessica grunting and groaning as they heave together to pull up Ruella, who has fallen off a balcony.

Director Stevens could turn up the volume in some scenes, especially when characters shout out necessarily exposition from behind closed doors, i.e., from behind the set. And the sotto voce tone in the last scene deprived people beyond the second row of tables of some of the production’s best jokes. In general, though, Communicating Doors is the area premiere of a British confection where a group of friends share their fun with the audience for the holidays. ❏

This production runs through Dec. 20. See Times Table for information.