When the curtain opens on a suburban Pennsylvania home in the North Fork Community Theatre’s winter production of Ken Ludwig’s “Leading Ladies,” you can tell by the number of doorways — five visible and more leading into implied hallways offstage — that you’re in for a wild ride of a farce.
Throughout the mayhem and door-slamming, this production, helmed expertly by NFCT veteran director Bob Horn, holds true to its one big goal: To give the audience an opportunity to forget their cares for an evening and enjoy the absurdity that a good night of community theater comedy can provide.
The play opens, like many good shows about nefarious traveling ne’er-do-wells, on a train, after British Shakespearian actors Leo Clark and Jack Gable have just been booed offstage while attempting to present a mash-up of Shakespearian scenes at a Moose Lodge in Pennsylvania.
While on the train, Clark and Gable read in The York Times (which is actually a copy of the North Fork’s Suffolk Times with a placard reading “York” paper-clipped to its front page) that a woman on her deathbed in York, PA is searching for her nephews who left for Britain as children, in the hopes of sharing her fortune with them.
Penniless and desperate, the actors embark on a scheme to collect the fortune, but their plans run into a major snag that they learn of from a roller-skating waitress on the train — the benefactor’s ‘nephews,’ Max and Steve, are not nephews at all. They’re nieces, Maxine and Stephanie, who have masculine nicknames. And the benefactor, Florence, had died that morning. Or had she?
The casting of Alek Lewis as Clark and Nicholas Auletti as Gable couldn’t have been better — the two actors are wry yet effusive, charming and absurd, as they don petticoats and braziers from their suitcases of costumes and attempt to woo Florence’s extended family. They carry this show on a romp through increasingly improbable absurdities.
Lewis proves his character to be as capable a seducer as a woman as he had been as a man, while Auletti meets another big challenge — of course Stephanie is deaf and mute — with increasingly absurd effect.
Suzette Reiss is fierce and feisty as Florence, who had been declared dead that morning by her incompetent physician, Doc Myers when she was, in fact, quite alive.
Clark and Gable stifle their horror at the news that Florence is actually alive when they arrive at the family home and are introduced by Audrey, the roller-skating waitress, who is engaged to Doc Myers’ son, Butch. But Florence welcomes them and seems unperturbed by their large figures and body hair. She believes them to be her long-lost family.
Kat Motlenski is delightful as Audrey, all earnest small-town charm, excited to show off her vocabulary and all of her newfound learnings.
Tender and naive Meg, Florence’s local niece, also an heir, who dreams of a career as an actress but whose ambitions are belittled by her preacher fiancé, is played with delicate sensitivity by Daina Reynolds.
She blossoms as her visitors encourage her artistic talents, and believes in the purity of their hearts despite their deceptions, a scenario you might recognize from classic theatrical depictions of midwestern innocence like Marian Paroo’s love for Professor Harold Hill in “The Music Man.” After all, this play hints but doesn’t preach, love is love.
The assembled cast, including Eric Koch, shy as Butch; Lon Schomer as Meg’s scheming and preaching fiancé, the Reverend Duncan Wooley; and Gene O’Brien as the hapless doctor, are all pressed into service in a sly and quite relevant interpretation of “Twelfth Night,” which caps a wild and fast-paced evening of mayhem.
The audience is left blinking in surprise as the house lights come up and we realize we’ve successfully spent the last two hours transported to a world where few of the problems mirror our own.
“Leading Ladies” will be on stage at the North Fork Community Theatre, 12700 Main Road in Mattituck on Friday and Saturday evenings at 7:30 p.m., with Sunday matinees at 2:30 p.m., through Feb. 2. Tickets are $33 online or $30 in person, and are available at nfct.com or by calling 631.298.6328.
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