`Run for Your Wife,” Ray Cooney’s wildly popular sex farce, is getting a very good run indeed in its new lickety-split production at Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace.
Cooney, an English actor and director, is without doubt the most successful contemporary farceur in the English language, his hits having piled up record runs in London and frequent appearances in America. (His plays were a comedy staple at the late Forum Theatre.)
As an art form, Cooney’s kind of sex farce is about as subtle as an alarm clock; but it’s just as reliable and just as complex in its mechanisms, and, when the time comes, it rings the bell with amazing precision.
The ingredients in “Run for Your Wife” are the stuff of standard farcical fare: mistaken identities, wrong numbers, double entendres, furious pacing, incredible plot complications and, particularly in English farce, a lot of naughty talk about but absolutely no action in every kind of sex.
“Wife,” which ran for more than 1,600 performances in London in the early 1980s, has been “Americanized” by Cooney for its U.S. engagements, and director Ray Frewen’s crack Oakbrook Terrace cast puts several spins on the material, too. There are references to Frank Gifford, “Melrose Place” and David Letterman.
The basic situation from which all the complications arise is the same, however: John Smith, an “ordinary” cab driver, has two homes and two wives, and that gets him into a lot of trouble.
Frewen’s staging is handsome, smart and slick. Running about in Kurt Sharp’s attractive set, which neatly places both homes on stage at the same time, the players mug, scream and go into one goggle-eyed double take after another with the practiced ease of experts.
John William Cooke, gasping for breath and clutching his heart at every crisis, is the beleaguered cab driver; Sean Grennan, ever so sly in his silliness, is his upstairs neighbor, and Kathryn Jaeck and Fiona Bergin are his two fetching wives.
Also banging home the punch lines are Dev Kennedy and Kate Buddeke as confused inquiring detectives, and J. Scott Ament as a mincing homosexual dress designer (naturally) who flits in and out of the action.
His character must bear the burden of the play’s crude, stereotypical sex jokes, but he carries them off so deftly that he’s hilarious, in spite of them.
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“Run for Your Wife”
When: Through Oct. 5
Where: Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace, 100 Drury Lane, Oakbrook Terrace
Phone: 630-530-0111 or 312-902-1500
