Guilty parties

The 1974 Broadway production of Alan Ayckbourn’s British farce, “Absurd Person Singular,” is nearly legendary.

For one thing, it was loaded with stars – Sandy Dennis, Tony Roberts, Richard Kiley, Geraldine Page.

More than that, it served as a perfect theatrical “holiday party” about … holiday parties.

We see three couples, all of them engaged in various forms of social climbing/posterior kissing/backstabbing, at three successive holiday dinner parties: last Christmas, this Christmas and next Christmas.

Each party is spiked with its own form of holiday dysfunction, including, but not limited to, depression, drunkenness and free-floating anxiety.

All of which makes it a promising comic choice as the holiday season play for the Actor’s Repertory Theatre (ARt), where it opens this weekend.

Ayckbourn’s British-suburban farces have always been successful with Spokane audiences. Michael Weaver’s ARt troupe exhibited an excellent touch last year with the playwright’s “How the Other Half Loves.”

That was the first Ayckbourn play to cross the pond to the United States in 1971. “Absurd Person Singular” was the second, and a far bigger hit.

It ran on Broadway for a year-and-a-half and launched a longstanding American taste for Ayckbourn’s plays. “Absurd Person Singular,” in particular, became a staple of regional theater.

Walter Kerr of The New York Times described the play as “a virtual anatomy of social laughter, perhaps of the comic impulse itself.”

“Instead of describing parties, it functioned as a party functions, complete with trigger, detonation (and) sighing but not dissatisfied aftermath,” wrote Kerr afterward. “Mr. Ayckbourn’s touch was light, his sympathies warm, his vision the vision of a zoom lens.”

Now, 31 years later, “Absurd Person Singular” is back on Broadway in a revival.

Ben Brantley of The New York Times, while not nearly as enthusiastic as Kerr back in 1974, noted that the play contains “little masterpieces of nearly foolproof comic contrivance, with absurdity seeming to rise both improbably and inevitably out of the everyday.”

The ARt version is directed by Chad Henry, best known as the playwright of the Seattle musical smash “Angry Housewives.”

Henry, originally from Everett, is a resident member of the acting company at the Denver Center Theatre. He directed “Dirty Blonde” for ARt last season.

The cast includes Page Byers, Therese Diekhans, Kathie Doyle-Lipe, Reed McColm, John Oswald and Michael Weaver.

ARt is a professional theater operating out of the Spartan Theatre at Spokane Falls Community College.

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