Cyclonic Kin Interplayers’ ‘Indiscretions’ Presents A Ravaging But Entertaining Satire Of Family Dysfunction

“Indiscretions” Saturday, March 8, Interplayers Ensemble

The words “cyclone” and “tornado” sounded like hyperbole when I first read them in the advance publicity for “Indiscretions.”

Then the lights went down and the cyclone struck. The opening scene of this dark 1938 Jean Cocteau comedy is a virtual eruption, with the mother Yvonne staggering around her bedroom in an insulin-induced daze while the rest of the family shouts and moans and races madly in a delirium of hysterical helplessness.

It’s the perfect beginning to a play about the ultimate dysfunctional family: a middle-class Parisian crew that regularly stages its own melodramatic scenes of chaos and hysteria for no good reason except to pass the time and to torture each other.

And that’s just the beginning. The Interplayers production, directed with fine fury by Robert Welch, rarely lets up in its nearly three hours (counting intermissions) of craziness.

I hesitate to call this a comedy because that might imply that this is a family of lovable eccentrics, like the goofy Sycamore family in “You Can’t Take It With You.”

Instead, “Indiscretions” is a devastatingly satiric look at a truly unpleasant brood dominated by a mother who makes “Mommy Dearest” look like a cream puff. Not for nothing is the original title of this play “Les Parents Terribles.”

As played with high energy by Patt Blem, Yvonne has mastered the art of turning maternal love into psychological torture.

When her beloved son, the 21-year-old Michael (Tim McMurray) announces that he has fallen in love with a 25-year-old bookbinder, Madeleine (Jennifer True), she informs him he might as well stick a dagger in her heart. “Old hag” and “slut” are the kindest words she uses to describe the love of her son’s life, and she has never even met the woman.

The father, George, played well by J. Bretton Truett, isn’t much better. He’s calmer and marginally more sane, but his philandering results in the family’s biggest crisis. Let’s just say that he also is acquainted with this 25-year-old bookbinder.

The balance of the play has the structure of pure farce, but it’s sharpened to a deadly serious point.

Obviously Cocteau does not like the members of this family. Beyond that, he finds their softness, their lethargy, their smugness to be at the heart of what’s wrong with French society in 1938. In a way, “Indiscretions” helps explain why France was such easy prey for Hitler two years later.

The entire ensemble contributes to this play’s success, but the real triumph belongs to Andrea Akins as Leonie (Leo).

In Akins’ portrayal, Leo is graceful, elegant and grounded in reality - everything the rest of the family is not. She has been wounded in love, but she still has a heart, if rarely used.

Akins is our point of reference in this chaos. Whenever things get seriously deranged, as they often do, Leo steps in and tells everybody (to use a ‘90s phrase) to get a grip.

Yet Cocteau doesn’t let Leo off lightly, either. By play’s end, Akins has made it clear she too knows the fine art of devious manipulation.

This production lacks almost all of the visual imagery that was praised so highly in the 1995 Broadway revival. Interplayers can’t recreate Madeleine’s spiral staircase, settling instead for a couple of stairs.

If the set or the costumes were making any particular symbolic statement, I didn’t catch it.

Nor did I particularly miss it. The script and the actors kept me riveted from start to finish.

As far as I’m concerned, “Indiscretions” is great theater: a play sharp enough to skewer and funny enough to entertain.

, DataTimes MEMO: “Indiscretions” continues through March 29 at the Interplayers Ensemble. Call 455-PLAY for reservations.