By Jackie Demaline
The Cincinnati Enquirer

In A Flea in Her Ear at Playhouse in the Park, Anderson Matthews plays the prosperous but maligned, middle-aged husband of a suspicious young wife. He also plays a drunken porter at a hotel of ill-repute.

The two characters do all but collide in the second act of Flea. Chandebise (the husband) runs out one door and Poche (the porter) comes in another. The audience waits in happy anticipation for comic disaster.

Farce has been an entertainment mainstay starting with the ancient Greeks and running to contemporary film. It's fueled by comic misunderstandings, mistaken identities, bizarre coincidences and clockwork timing.

IF YOU GO

• What: A Flea in Her Ear When: 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 5 and 9 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday through Nov. 22. Additional matinee 1 p.m. Nov. 20.   • Where: Playhouse in the Park Marx Theatre, Eden Park   • Tickets: $31-$43. 421-3888. All unreserved seats are half-price when purchased day of show at the box office 11 a.m.-5 p.m. (starting at noon on Sundays).   • Also: At 6 p.m. today, Broadway author and producer Ralph G. Allen÷ will present a pre-show lecture "The Rhythm, Style and Meaning of Jokes" in the Playhouse's Marx Rehearsal Hall as part of the free Playhouse Perspectives÷ series. Mr. Allen wrote the book for 1979÷ hit musical Sugar Babies. He is a theater historian and professor emeritus at Queens College in New York.

It's a riotous good time from where we're looking at it, comfortable (and safe) in the audience.

Onstage and backstage, farce is hard work.

"Farce is like a machine," observes Mr. Matthews.

It's a machine of precisely timed entrances and exits, opening and closing doors, planted props, and in the case of the French bedroom farce Flea, even a revolving bed. In the farces of its playwright, Georges Feydeau, the action is punctuated by innuendo, double entendre and at least one or two incomprehensible characters.

"It's like one of Rube Goldberg's elaborate mechanisms," laughs Norma Jenckes, professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. "We're amazed and delighted by the near collisions, by anticipation of the trap that has to spring, by the energy that grows and grows until it has to explode."

And farce is a machine that runs on human energy, adds stage manager Jenifer Morrow, who calls the show's action. The actors, crew and technicians, she says, have to feel the split-second timing in their bones.

Complicated switch

Let's pretend we have a seat backstage at the Playhouse during Flea's pivotal second act.

We are at Hotel Belle Epoque because Raymonde (Deanne Lorette) has set a trap for her straying husband (Mr. Matthews) that is going sadly awry because he's faithful. Her best friend Lucienne (Andrea Cirie) has penned a fake love note, which has fallen into the hands of Lucienne's jealous husband, Carlos (Thom Rivera), who conveniently has a pistol.

FARCES ON FILM

If you're wondering what's happened to the stage farce, it's alive and well at the movies. Top big screen farces : • Some Like It Hot. • All the Inspector Clouseau films, including A Shot in the Dark and The Pink Panther, all starring Peter Sellars • A Fish Called Wanda. • Woody Allen's Hollywood Ending. • A lot of Monty Python films such as The Life of Brian; Arsenic and Old Lace; A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum; The Birdcage. • Many Blake Edwards films including Victor/Victoria and The Party (again with Peter Sellars); It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and its many remakes (including Rat Race).

For reasons too complicated to explain, at various times one or more of them (among others) occupy a room with a revolving bed (designed for fast exits for the guilty). The comings and goings of identical Chandebise and Poche add to the confusion.

As Poche, Mr. Anderson climbs a circular stair to leave the stage, and re-enters as Chandebise climbing up to the stage from a different set of stairs.

"I thought that was going to be the hardest thing I would be doing," Mr. Matthews laughs. (It turns out it isn't.) After Poche leaves the stage "I run halfway around the theater, down two flights of stairs and then up one for my entrance."

Before he goes back on stage, head of wardrobe Cindy Saalfeld is waiting for him. For some changes he has up to three dressers "yanking and combing (the characters wear their hair differently) while I'm buttoning," laughs Mr. Matthews, "then I turn to a door and walk. They're a crack team, and Cindy is brilliant."

While he was rehearsing for his dual roles, Mr. Matthews didn't worry about how they were different. He wondered why people would mistake a successful businessman and a drunken buffoon and set about creating similarities.

"The costumers are vital," he adds and points to a bit in the third act, when Chandebise is forcefully put back into the porter's uniform by Poche's surly employer (Thomas Carson).

It's a neat piece of physical business that starts with the costume: "The jacket is pre-set with the sleeve already up," explains Mr. Matthews. "As soon as I see his hand poke through the arm I know I have to look like he's yanking me."

All in the timing

If you're watching when something is happening, it's too late.

Mr. Matthews climbs the stairway to the Hotel Belle Epoch lobby as Poche. He's carrying a load of wood, and he has to be in precisely the right spot when the wood falls out. That's so he can have a near miss with the characters who know him as Chandebise. (Mr. Matthews has two loads, one sewn together so the wood can't fall at the wrong moment, and another that will come apart on cue.)

To get to that spot, he can't enter too early or too late.

"So six lines earlier, I know which step I have to be on," Mr. Matthews says. He arrives when he's supposed to and manages to hide his face from other characters.

"Nobody pays attention until a moment is the focus of attention," he says, "but it's already been set up. We're always setting up something and you have to have a lucid conversation while you're doing it."

And it can never look technical. "It all has to make logical sense, that it could happen that way. It's painstaking. (Director) Jack (Going) is a task-master."

It helps, Mr. Matthews says, to remember the motivator in farce - urgency bordering on desperation. "As the character, I'm thinking, `If I don't get out of the room at this moment, I'll die."

The technical aspects of the show become second nature during the rehearsal process, Mr. Matthews says, and he's seconded by Ms. Morrow.

"It becomes a part of your body. It has to. You can't think about it," she says. "You know that a beat and a half after this word is said, this has to happen.

But there will always be those moments.

"A door opening seems like a little thing," says Ms. Morrow, but during the second act, there's a lighting cue with every opening and closing door.

"You have to anticipate," she says. So the lighting cues are called when an actor's hand is reaching the doorknob.

On a preview night, an actor couldn't get a door open, at least not on the expected beat. Ms. Morrow doesn't think the audience even noticed, but it's the kind of thing that keeps the company - cast and crew - on the alert.

The props

At the end of Act 2, there are gunshots. The bed is turning. Lights are going on and off. Doors are opening. People are running, falling, screaming.

Ms. Morrow jokes that by the time the blackout comes, "I have knots the size of tennis balls on my shoulders."

First, there's the gun. "No matter how safe we know it is, when there's a gun, there's always extra attention."

Then there's the bed. It operates on people power.

"It takes three or four people for a manual turn" says Ms. Morrow, all of them dressed in black from head to toe, including netting over their eyes and black gloves because, when the bed is half-turned, if all weren't total darkness, we'd see them.

Crew chief Amanda Powell has a headset, and the entire props crew watches for the cue light above the bed. The light comes on for standby, when it's time to move, Ms. Morrow pulls the switch, the light shines and off they go, with Ms. Powell making sure the bed stops in exactly the correct position.

On opening night, the audience roared appreciatively as Mr. Matthews wrestled with a straight-backed chair, with the chair consistently winning.

What the audience didn't know was that the joke really was on Mr. Matthews, he said laughing the next day.

"The chair had come apart. So I was looking like I couldn't get out when it was me really getting in and holding it together. I knew people had to sit in it later."

Learning in a hurry

Acts 1 and 3 are like drawing room comedy; Act 2 is like a musical, "fast-paced, everyone's popping in and out," says Ms. Morrow. "The hardest thing is switching gears."

The typical Playhouse production (other than musicals) has three or four people on a stage crew. Flea has nine.

Raise the degree of difficulty: Flea transferred from St. Louis, giving the Playhouse crew less than four days to put the show together, just two days to learn it in the rehearsal room as director Going returned for a brush-up before the Cincinnati run began.

Ms. Morrow went to St. Louis to take notes for five days before. "I watched from the house, from backstage, from the booth," she says. "What has to be done for each actor while the show is running."

Ms. Saalfeld and Ms. Powell also saw the show in St. Louis. Part of their task was figuring out the set change between the two acts. The two theaters' stages are configured differently, and moving the interlocking pieces becomes its own elaborate dance, one that earns nightly applause for the crew from audience members who stay in the auditorium during intermission.

"We hear it and we appreciate it," Ms. Morrow says. "It's hard work."

Of course it is. It's farce.

E-mail jdemaline@enquirer.com