Opening night brings on Double Duty
Michael Weaver has taken on a tall order. Actually, two tall orders.
For one thing, he’s directing Alan Ayckbourn’s comedy-farce, “How the Other Half Loves,” in which two separate scenes are played out simultaneously on one set that represents two different apartments. The residents carry on conversations oblivious to the existence of the others.
“How do you play a scene in which someone is sitting right next to you, but they don’t know you’re there?” asked Weaver.
Yet the other tall order is even more daunting. He and managing director Grant Smith are creating a brand new professional theater from scratch. “How the Other Half Loves,” which opens Friday, is the first-ever production of Actor’s Repertory Theatre of the Inland Northwest (ARt).
So far, Weaver is a bit flummoxed at just how well each of these daunting tasks is going.
“I’m really surprised,” said Weaver, who quit as associate artistic director at Interplayers last year. “I thought there would be a lot more challenges. It’s not a piece of cake, but the most rewarding thing for me is how the artistic communities in both Seattle and Spokane are behind us. And ticket sales are going extraordinarily well. It’s heartening and thrilling.”
In fact, opening night is threatening to sell out. Subscriptions are also selling surprisingly well, said Weaver, even for weeknight performances.
The venue, Spokane Falls Community College’s Spartan Playhouse, has proven to be a good location for ARt so far. It seats 211 (about 40 fewer than Interplayers), with good sight lines and state-of-the-art technical capabilities.
“The staff at SFCC has been falling all over themselves to be helpful,” said Weaver.
Weaver has assembled a cast that includes some familiar faces from previous Interplayers productions. After an absence of more than a decade, Page Byers of Seattle is returning to Spokane, where she appeared in many Interplayers shows. Jane Fellows and Phelps L’Hommedieu of Whitefish, Mont., are also returning, having both worked extensively with Weaver at Interplayers.
Patrick Treadway, Damon Mentzer and Caryn Hoaglund are Spokane actors who have done extensive work around the region.
Also returning to Spokane, in a manner of speaking, is the work of playwright Alan Ayckbourn, who was an Interplayers staple in the 1990s.
“When we started the theater, so many people said, ‘We want to see Ayckbourn,’ ” said Weaver. “Well, I love Ayckbourn. His plays are so much fun to work on, because there is so much to mine out of them.”
“The Oxford Companion to Theatre” writes that Ayckbourn “depicts with humor, accuracy and the occasional note of cruelty, the sexual and other tensions of middle-class English life.”
Ayckbourn has written 67 plays, yet “How the Other Half Loves” is widely considered to be one of his triumphs. It premiered in London in 1970 and then made a successful leap to Broadway in 1971, starring Phil Silvers, Sandy Dennis and Richard Mulligan. The Broadway adaptation is set in America instead of England and is the version that ARt is doing.
Interplayers did a successful version of “How the Other Half Loves” in 1992, although Weaver was not involved.
It’s about two philandering husbands who each tell their wives that they were out counseling a third troubled couple. In the first act, scenes from each apartment are played out simultaneously. In the second act, the two couples collide with the third couple at two different dinner parties, which are also staged at the same time on the same set.
It’s a kind of theatrical juggling act which can turn moderately funny scenes into explosively funny scenes. And it serves a symbolic function as well.
“The whole concept of having two apartments on stage is a metaphor for what the play is about, which is noncommunication,” said Weaver. “It’s really funny. Everybody calls it a farce, except Ayckbourn. He calls it a play.”