The problem is that director Andrea Allen keeps goosing what shouldn't be pinched, refusing to leave the quirky purity of Maynard's work untouched. Allen has successfully directed other comedies for Annex (most notably The Women), but has a tendency here to oversimplify the humor in the script, leading the cast to turn what should be more seamless amusement into obvious jokes. The double-entendres (there are numerous botanical sexual metaphors) are put across in an easy Three's Company style, and though there is otherwise no uniformity among the cast, there is a sameness in delivery. Whenever an actor wants to cue us in on a joke, the punch line is hit by dropping the theatrical facade, as if the only way to get a laugh is to point out how they'd really be talking if they weren't saddled with Maynard's damned highfalutin dialogue. The self-conscious construction leaps out at you; it's as though, without the extra effort, we might not see our own way through the language and recognize what is funny.
Tone, that niggling detail, is a big stumbling block here. Rather than establish a world in which heightened language is the norm, Allen avoids creating an ensemble and instead wedges the actors into the text. Waschke is fine as Beatrice (she comes the closest to Maynard's rhythms), but is so over-choreographed that she has no place in the otherwise loose environment Allen has created. The amiable Budraitis gets awfully fidgety and ironic with his comic Italian accent, which then takes the edge off his later dramatic scenes. The attractive Jorgensen flattens herself with an erroneous attempt at naturalism, making the spastic Macdonald look positively pop-eyed in contrast and putting Andrisevic's broad "Een zee gar-den" French foil in an altogether different production. List, a truly funny performer in other circumstances, isn't forced to use the text as perimeters for his character, and (on opening night, at least) gamely behaves like he's trapped in a particularly long improv. He has the part in him -- you can see fuzzy glimmers of it -- but Allen hasn't paid him enough attention. A running gag that has the Fiancé patiently trying to explain the concept of an airplane to bewildered listeners is ruined because List reaches a sloppy comic climax with it the first time out of the gate. The lack of containment also blows his other big scene, a crucial, darkly comic moment when he explodes in frantic disbelief after being confronted with what he thinks are Beatrice's decidedly unvirginal, all-consuming passions (it's actually a conniving Daphne).
It's too bad the production loses itself, because the black, bawdy farce working at its core is quite engaging. Surely some of it works -- especially if you're not surrounded by the numbingly sycophantic responses of an Annex opening-night audience, which howls breathlessly at every minor comic distraction. If you can calmly sit back and enjoy the material that is quietly working beneath the cacophony of this particular production, there are some definite pleasures to be had in Maynard's writing. She gets too highhanded with nods to the Apollo and Daphne myth that are never quite integrated, but she very successfully enlarges the complexities of a centuries-old play. There is an intriguing melancholy in the idea of a tramp who longs for purity and a virgin who longs to be devoured -- a smart confrontation between people and the needful loss of their ideals, and a thoughtful winking at the idea of farce itself.
