THEATER REVIEW
“The Explorers Club”
Grade: C+
Through April 19. 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays; 10 a.m. Wednesday (April 15 only). $16-$40. Aurora Theatre, 128 E. Pike St., Lawrenceville. 678-226-6222, www.auroratheatre.com.
Bottom line: A forced farce.
Few things are as distressing as watching good actors struggle with not-so-good material. At first, in small stretches, it’s fun to see a number of them hamming it up in Aurora Theatre’s “The Explorers Club,” a lame farce by Nell Benjamin. In large part, however, it’s just embarrassing.
Farces will be farces, of course — the frenzied pace, the physical shtick — and the best of them are usually grounded in some semblance of believability (if not exactly reason or realism). What director Jaclyn Hofmann and her cast might have accomplished with, say, "Tartuffe" beggars the imagination, but suffice it to say that Benjamin's unrelentingly inane "Club" is no Moliere (nor even a Ken Ludwig).
On the plus side, co-stars Courtney Patterson and Tony Larkin emerge from the show relatively unscathed, not so much by playing it straight as by simply toning it down a notch.
The setting is Victorian-era England. She’s Phyllida Spotte-Hume, a spirited explorer newly returned from discovering a lost South American city (and with an indigenous “savage” in tow to prove it). He’s Lucius Fretway, a smitten botanist who recommends her to join the titular club (to the chagrin of its all-male members).
Although their characters aren’t written with any greater distinction than the rest, they’re the least objectionable among them. Other experienced troupers in the Aurora ensemble wear out their welcomes too quickly as a variety of eccentric blowhards.
The ordinarily appealing Chad Martin has never seemed more cloying than he does here, as the dimwitted club president (just back from an expedition to find the East Pole), who has his own designs on Phyllida. Ditto Jacob York as the pompous private secretary to an unseen Queen Victoria (whose audience with Phyllida's feral jungle man causes an uproar).
Venerable veteran Chris Kayser is mildly amusing as a biblical scholar whose latest theory proposes relocating the Irish to Palestine, while George Contini and Al Stilo are strictly over-the-top as an interchangeable pair of animal-loving scientists. Steve Hudson arrives late on the scene as a presumed-dead colleague.
Tim Whitson, a member of Aurora’s apprentice company, plays the restless native. For all the hemming and hawing of everyone else, the show’s funniest gag involves his stint as a bartender, casually hurling drinks at the others with considerable precision.
The stately set is by Lizz Dorsey, the fancy costumes by Elizabeth Rasmusson.
Hyperactivity and hot air go with the farcical territory, but bigger doesn’t always mean better in “The Explorers Club.”
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