Big-finish finale worth waiting for in Little Theatre’s ‘Bedroom Farce’

The last 15 minutes or so of Las Vegas Little Theatre’s “Bedroom Farce” are about as funny as one can hope for in a comedy. Playwright Alan Ayckbourn gives us a humorous peek into the lives of four married couples, all of whom seem to be surviving matrimony in different ways.

Ron Lindblom’s homey, varied set is of three bedrooms in separate houses, and the decor in each tells us much about the people who reside there. One is tastefully understated, another is messy but cozy (it suggests a kid’s coloring book) and the third is very elegant and traditional. Lindblom gives us strong clues about character before the play even begins.

The plot is playfully thin, involving an emotional couple, Trevor (Scott DelGiudice) and Susannah (Sarah Spraker) whose marital battles intrude on the lives of their friends.

While those last 15 minutes are uproarious, the rest of the play is more about smiles than laughs. There’s not much meat on this script, and I think if it’s going to work, we need sharply defined, realistic characters who effortlessly charm us.

We get that in the older couple — the grumbling Ernest (Gary Lunn) and the sweet-natured Delia (Barbara King). Lunn and King show us how their characters have grown past the melodrama of youth. The performers seem a perfect fit, vocally, emotionally and physically.

There’s also some hysterically funny but sane work by DelGiudice, portraying a man who doesn’t realize how much he needs his wife, and Amanda Lofink as Jan, an amusingly efficient, level-headed young wife who spends most of her time tending to her ailing and wailing husband (Tony Blosser).

I think director Rob Kastil starts the comedy at too high a pitch so that we feel most of these performers straining for laughs. This is particularly evident in his direction of Spraker. The actress is playing an eccentric, but Kastil has her so over-the-top that there’s no way we can take her seriously.

She’s dressed like a bargain-basement vaudeville gypsy. Her get-up and playing style leads us to expect uproarious farce, but that’s not what Ayckbourn is about. The author wins us over with delicately drawn characters.

Kastil rises to the challenge of the big-finish finale, but he’s too often in-your-face to allow Ayckbourn’s delicacy to shine through.

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at vegastheaterchat @aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.