Carl Sternheim's The Underpants must have been a shocking experience back in 1911, what with its explicit references to a lady's intimate undergarments and its many allusions to premeditated adultery. But as adapted by Steve Martin (that's right), the play has little to offer besides crude characterizations, shallow, too-obvious humor and a plot so thin that it evaporates right in front of us.
Even the earnest acting of several of the best players in the current Hat Trick Theatre production can't make this stopped clock start ticking, and instead of wild and crazy humor, we get stupid jokes on a theme that a 14-year-old would find too tame.
When will Hat Trick start scheduling plays as good as its best actors? It's a pity to see Jack Holloway, Emilia Sargent and Careena Cornette give themselves so generously to a script as limited as this one, and director C. David Frankel is too skillful to be handed so irrelevant a project. After a few years of this sort of thing, I'm beginning to wonder: How does Hat Trick choose its seasons?
The story the play tells is about Louise, a married woman whose underpants unaccountably fall to her feet while she's watching a parade in which the King is passing. Her husband Theo is shocked and worries that he'll lose his job as a civil servant. Two men who witnessed the scandalous event want to take Louise to bed. Louise's neighbor Gertrude tries to facilitate the adultery, but the logistics are problematic, and the would-be adulterers, a poet and a barber, are exceedingly inefficient.
There's a twist at the end. And the theme of underpants recurs regularly.
Now, I should say at this point that author Sternheim is much more gifted — and more important in the history of theater — than the Martin adaptation lets on. A more faithful translation would have given us, at the very least, some interesting language to enjoy. An example: In the first minutes, when Theo is chiding his wife, he says (in the M.A. McHaffie translation): "I'm to blame for having a wife like you, a slattern like you, a trollop and stargazer. Where's the real world? Down here, in the saucepan, on your dustcoated living-room floor and not up there in the sky, do you hear? Is this chair polished? No — filth. Has this cup a handle? Wherever I lay my hand, the world is splitting apart. Crack after crack in an existence like yours."
In the Martin adaptation, this entire harangue is cut down and turned into "But they will blame me. They will blame me for having a wife who is so distracted by staring out the window, who is so hypnotized by a canary in a cage, that she can't even tie a tiny knot in two slender cords."
All of Sternheim's critique of middle-class values — the dusty floor leading to Theo's feeling that the world is splitting apart — is lost in Martin's reduction of the speech. Other examples abound. And the key to understanding Sternheim — a fierce critic of the middle class — vanishes in favor of meaningless streamlining.
Fortunately, Holloway is too good an actor to let these problems get in his way. Holloway's Theo is a strong and simple soul, a macho lower bureaucrat who won't have sex with his wife because he figures they can't afford the upkeep of a child. As that wife, Careena Cornette is coy and cagey, willing to be persuaded that adultery is in her future, but possessing an indomitable moral streak that always brings her back to Theo. And the talented Emilia Sargent is wonderful as neighbor Gertrude, a woman who hopes to experience adultery vicariously and who blithely prepares Louise for her lovers — with newly made underpants.
The other performers are not so impressive. Jonathan Cho as the poet Versati lacks complexity and the sense of internal tension, and Phillip Gulley as barber Cohen doesn't have much personality at all — I didn't know who he was as I watched the play, and I can't understand him in retrospect.
Anne Johannensen's living-room set is dowdy and unattractive, but Connie Lamarca Frankel's costumes are among the most appropriate I've seen in a Hat Trick production.
Director Frankel does his utmost to keep the play moving quickly, but the Martin adaptation is unsolvable. Unless, that is, you're a pre-adolescent who's a) intrigued by this thing called sex and b) never been to the theater.
Anyway, with actors like Holloway, Cornette and Sargent, Hat Trick is halfway to making a difference to playgoers. Now what's needed are more scripts like the company's most successful: When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder, Bash and The Pavilion. With the right plays, this company could be of real importance in the mix that is Bay area theater.
The Underpants is a misstep.
But the season's still young. And fortunately, those Hat Tricksters are very, very stubborn.
This article appears in Jan 16-22, 2008.