Polish Joke
A Contemporary Theatre, 292-7676. Through Aug 5.

David Ives’ collection of short plays, All in the Timing, swept through Off-Broadway and regional theaters several years ago like a hot knife through butter. Adjectives like “genius” and “wizardly” got tossed around–but unfortunately, the pieces were only comedy sketches, slender comic ideas briefly animated by two-dimensional characters. References to Trotsky, Hamlet, and Philip Glass gave them a highbrow patina, but they weren’t trying for anything profound. All the inordinate praise only made the sketches seem meager.

Ives’ Polish Joke reaches for more. Jasiu (Ted deChatelet), a Polish American lad, is warned by his philosophical uncle Roman (Richard Ziman) that Poles are doomed to disaster, citing everything from cuisine (duck’s blood soup) to phonetics (“Polish is the only language in which ‘K’ is a vowel”) to innate psychological temperament. He advises Jasiu to claim a different ethnic heritage as soon as possible. The rest of the play chronicles Jasiu’s struggle to escape his inner Poland, only to be foiled at every turn.

For three scenes, Polish Joke has the verbal gymnastics one expects from Ives, undergirded with a surprising humanity. A conversation with a priest (John Aylward) about leaving seminary school is particularly affecting. The cast (including Nancy Bell and Leslie Law) is uniformly excellent, and–unsurprisingly–the emotional grounding makes the comedy funnier.

Then there’s a pointless dream sequence; then Jasiu decides he wants to live in Ireland, resulting in a madcap Irish travel agency scene; then there’s the ghost of a dead Polish patriot. It’s not that these scenes aren’t intermittently funny–it’s that their humor violates the delicate (and much more satisfying) balance of the real and the absurd established by earlier scenes. Later scenes struggle to return to that tone, but are hamstrung by the intervening wackiness. Perhaps the success of All in the Timing makes Ives feel obliged to goof it up: He’s clearly capable of more intimate writing, if he’d only trust it.