ART’s first offering is a delightful comedy

For the first performance ever of a new professional theatre – and that’s what this was for the Actors Repertory Theatre – you can’t choose a better comedy than “How the Other Half Loves.”

That’s because this 1971 Alan Ayckbourn play contains one of the flat-out funniest scenes in contemporary theater. It’s a scene in which two dinner parties are taking place simultaneously. At one party, Frank Foster is telling a long and tedious story. At the other party, Teresa Phillips is attempting to brain her drunken husband with various cooking utensils.

I can’t describe the theatrical alchemy by which these two scenes combine to create such utter comic anarchy. But something happens that multiplies the laughs by about 10.

And it worked like a charm for the Actors Repertory Theatre production, directed by Michael Weaver. People were screaming with laughter. This is the closing scene of the first act, and it created the kind of electricity at intermission that every theater strives for.

Not every scene is as funny as that one. And this was not a flawless production. But overall, the show is a satisfying beginning for a theater that may indeed become a Spokane institution.

Already, a certain formula is emerging. Weaver has taken some of the region’s outstanding actors, such as Page Byers from Seattle, and combined them with the best of Spokane’s local actors, such as Patrick Treadway and Caryn Hoaglund. He has put them in SFCC’s Spartan Playhouse, a cozy jewel box of a theater, and let them loose on the kind of play that was the Interplayers Ensemble’s bread and butter for a couple of decades.

The result is a crowd-pleaser, perhaps light on content, but fully satisfying as a wild good time.

This play is a standard-issue middle-class goofball farce, but with one ingenious gimmick: One single set represents two different houses. The people from one house wander around and hold conversations, oblivious to the people from the other house, who also wander around and hold conversations. The residents eventually converge in a plot involving extramarital affairs, mistaken identities, jealous husbands, dinner parties and a pot of soup that tastes suspiciously of air freshener.

The ensemble cast is well up to the task. All six actors contribute equally to the mayhem, yet Page Byers was particularly sly and knowing as the rich wife Fiona. Patrick Treadway was hysterical and even a bit menacing as the drunken husband Bob. And Hoaglund, as mousy Mary, was controlled and believable in what was once a stock stage character – the naïve and submissive wife – but now seems a strange anachronism.

A couple of off notes were in evidence. First, the casting of Jane Fellows as Teresa seemed to be against type, although Fellows certainly ran with the part. Second, some of the gestures and line deliveries seemed too broad, especially in such a cozy, 211-seat space.

Yet overall, this is a start that any new theater company would envy. ART begins with a flourish: A funny play, loads of electricity and a big crowd, sent home happy.