‘The Cottage’ Review: A Bedroom Farce Braves Broadway

The bedroom farce has had a wobbly history on American stages. The celebrated French farceur Feydeau is virtually never revived. The British have always had a healthier appetite for the genre, but one of the most successful of such comedies, Ray Cooney’s 1983 “Run for Your Wife,” which lasted nine years in the West End, was a quick fizzle on Broadway, playing less than two months.

So Sandy Rustin, the author of “The Cottage,” a sex farce in the classic British mold, which is even set in England, in 1923, deserves a cheer or two for bringing this rarely seen style of comedy back to Broadway, even if the play doesn’t rise into a soufflé of delightful door-slamming and tangled romantic confusion.

Performed with boisterous gusto by a cast featuring “Will and Grace” star Eric McCormack, and directed by Jason Alexander, whose years on “Seinfeld” have taught him a thing or two about comedy, the play had me smiling indulgently more often than clutching my belly. (With the exception of Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off,” an ingenious farce-within-a-farce seen on Broadway in three separate productions, and returning to London in September, I have never been much enamored of the form.)

“The Cottage” takes place in an expensive-looking but not overly grand house in the countryside outside London. Paul Tate dePoo III has designed it in a cozy-cluttered style that seems appropriate, although I doubt that even a house that comes to resemble a high-end version of a hotel renting rooms by the hour would feature as the centerpiece of its drawing room a louche-looking Empire chaise longue, bright red and trimmed in gold.

As the play begins, Mr. McCormack’s suavely debonair Beau and Laura Bell Bundy’s lavishly affectionate Sylvia are billing and cooing—well, mostly she is—after what we learn is their once-a-year, one-night adulterous tryst. As Sylvia pouts at how little time she gets to spend with Beau, they are interrupted by the arrival of Sylvia’s husband, Clarke (a funnily flustery Alex Moffat, of “Saturday Night Live”), who also happens to be Beau’s brother, and Marjorie (Lilli Cooper, on a sly simmer), the object of Clarke’s apparently more ardent and constant adulterous affections. The awkwardness barometer has by now begun skyrocketing, since Marjorie is, ahem, Beau’s wife—and she’s heavily pregnant, but by whom?

While they try to sort out the disorienting ramifications of these revelations, upper lips remain stiff, cocktails and tea are dispensed, and cigarettes are smoked in large quantities. The cigarette boxes and lighters, in absurd forms, become a running gag, as when Clarke casually picks up a miniature of Michelangelo’s David and appears to light his cigarette from the statue’s genitalia.

But before this quartet can establish any equilibrium, two more characters join the gathering: Dierdre (a nicely daffy Dana Steingold ), who is of a lower class than the rest of the characters—in fact she eventually and blithely admits she is a former prostitute—and later the husband she has just divorced, Richard (an impassioned Nehal Joshi ), who may or may not be a ruthless killer. According to Dierdre, he has bumped off a series of her lovers. I won’t spoil things by revealing how Dierdre and Richard figure into the plot.

The cast throw themselves into the proceedings with admirable energy; they deploy respectable British accents, although some blossom into overripeness. (I’m looking at, or rather listening to, you, Ms. Bundy.) Mr. Alexander mostly keeps the timing appropriately brisk—farce relying on bullet-train velocity to fulfill its comic potential—and while the play isn’t particularly rich in physical comedy, the occasional pratfalls are handled with aplomb.

Ms. Rustin, who wrote the popular stage adaptation of the movie and board game “Clue,” widely seen at regional theaters, has clearly studied the form well. And yet “The Cottage” doesn’t sustain the kind of adrenaline needed to keep non-farce-lovers from lapsing into lethargy. Once the characters are all assembled, the play slips into a lower gear as they begin exchanging quips and earnestly discussing the flaws in their various relationships, at times repeating back to one another details the audience has long since absorbed. What began as a series of gobsmacking revelations threatens to turn into a group therapy session, minus the therapist.

It is not an inspiriting sign, for instance, when the biggest laugh generated derives from a clamorous burst of flatulence, suggesting the playwright felt the need to stoop to vulgar means to goose the by-now-flagging action.

By the play’s end the comic machinations have mostly subsided, as at least one of the women, disillusioned by the games of romantic musical chairs, finds a path to self-empowerment, and in turn inspires others to self-reflection. “One can only know one’s self, when one’s self is free from the restraints others impose,” says perhaps the least likely character to be evincing a sudden philosophical bent.

Given the year the play is set, these developments seem more a matter of pandering to contemporary ideas than anything else. But linear logic is not a hallmark of farce, good, bad or, as in this case, indifferent.

—Mr. Isherwood is the Journal’s theater critic.