Hardly anything that is said in Georges Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear actually needs to be said. The fun little farce being produced as the final show of Wabash College’s Theater season actually deals mostly with fun word games and physicality. For those of you unfamiliar in farce, consider this a quick overview of what to look for when you come see this show.
The play centers on cuckoldry, miscommunication and lots of physical humor. The play creates the world of a sex farce perfectly on stage. The idea behind a farce rests more on the physical manipulations of a character’s body rather than the words coming out of their mouth. Many characters speak foreign languages (or something similar to one), which lends itself to the destruction of language’s importance in the play.
The influences director James Phillips is using for A Flea in Her Ear come from commedia dell’arte, Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. The humorous stylings of Chaplin and the Marx Brothers are readily seen with breakdowns in communication and special attention to humor contortions of the body.
This will be an incredibly fun play to watch for nothing else but the way in which the characters move and interact with their environment.
The funny parts often come not from something that is said, but in how a character acts when saying it. There are some genuinely funny lines, many of which have been translated in such a way that an American audience would find it humorous. However, the real humor comes from the direction the actors take the story and how they move around and not so much the words translated from the original French of 100 years prior.
Phillips’ style of directing differs greatly from that of other directors of the Theater Department in that he is constantly on stage performing with the actors. He wants to get his hands dirty, showing them the form he wants their bodies to go and maybe getting some physical brilliance to emerge. Again, the physicality overtakes the plot.
The plot takes a back seat, but still remains a semi-important piece as Feydeau’s play pushes his characters around stage in their uncontrollable situations. The world of a farce (especially a sex farce) deals mostly in the absurd and outside the realm of realism. The idea is for the characters and situations to become more and more ridiculous as the play moves forward. There is nothing serious about a farce, but the characters find it to be of the utmost import.
Some people might see the title A Flea in Her Ear and wonder what it is supposed to mean. The title comes from a line, a French colloquialism, within the play referring to a person supposing something from small clues. So, it becomes a fly buzzing in the character’s ear, pointing out the iniquities in her own marriage which she believes no matter how untrue or absurd.
The past couple of shows we’ve seen here produced at Wabash have given us visions of serious matters of character and philosophy. Never the Sinner took our sensibilities and ethics about murder and turned them on their heads. David Mamet massacred the censors and questioned the cutthroat working man’s world in America in Glengarry Glen Ross. The final show of the season does something completely different.
A Flea in Her Ear will have you rolling with laughter, doing your best to keep up with the fast-paced movement that creates the world you see. People placing themselves in awkward positions, situations and costumes will only enhance the humor and drag you kicking and screaming from your realistic vision of the world. Wabash’s final production of the season aims to bludgeon your sensibilities and replace them for the evening with a little farce.