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For Better or Worse carries the seed of
judgment right in the title. Frankly, it could be better. An adaptation of two George
Feydeau comedies by Geoff Hoyle, who also takes the male lead, it chronicles the
absurdities of married life as seen through the squabbles of a Parisian manufacturer of
chamber pots and his nagging, self-centered wife, over-acted by Sharon Lockwood.
Both Hoyle and Lockwood are popular Bay Area performers, the former
almost an icon at Berkeley Rep, and, in the hands of less expert exponents, For Better
could have been a whole lot worse. Nevertheless, this kind of comedy – heavy on
literal potty humor with the protagonist’s product being worn as a helmet in the
first act and flung around the stage in the second – might well have been left in the
Belle Epoque, from whence it originated.
Far more enjoyable are a prelude and entr’acte in which Hoyle,
posing as a simpering expert from a nonexistent university, attempts to educate the
audience on the niceties of Feydeau farce. In the prelude, Barrington Regent begins with
the usual shtick about turning off your cell phones and segues to a hilarious send-up of
theatrical sponsorship in general (and Berkeley Rep in particular). At the end of the
first act the same character does a thing on the famed Feydeau “door slam” with
the aid of some audience conscripts who, on opening night, were so adept one wonders if
they were ringers.
It’s the filling of the sandwich that is the problem. In Act I,
Lockwood lumbers around the stage as a highly pregnant woman about to give birth while
Hoyle, her husband, simply wants his dinner, which, of course, is spaghetti, endlessly
stuffed into and hanging out of his mouth. Amy Resnick is the pert chambermaid and Lynda
Ferguson the overbearing mother-in-law called in to the crisis.
"Eight years and 21 chambermaids later” we are in Act II,
dealing with the child’s constipation problem. Daddy is trying to swing a deal to
sell his chamber pots to the French army. Mommy, strident in her bathrobe and curlers, is
trying to force a laxative down the kid’s throat. Guests are arriving for lunch and
the audience is ready to go home. Despite dropped pants and duels, cheating wives
(Ferguson again) and Spanish lovers (Rudy Guerrero doing a great Hank Azaria), this act
falls almost as flat as the first.
A “world premiere” co-production with the Arizona Theatre
Company, directed by its artistic director David Ira Goldstein, the show boasts a
wonderful fin de siecle set by Kent Dorsey and costumes by David Kay Mickelson.
But, in spite of the talent and resources lavished on this effort, still no cigar.
