It's not often that I'm as charmed by a play's cast as I was by the five actors of Mark Brown's Around the World in 80 Days. This surprising comedy, currently at Sarasota's Florida Studio Theatre, starts by seeming like nothing more than another adaptation of Jules Verne's famous novel, then turns out to be about five virtuoso performers and their ability to turn a nearly-bare stage into London and Yokohama, an elephant and a sledge, a snowstorm and a typhoon. These performers work hard — though they don't make it seem like too much work — and by the final ovation, we want to congratulate them not just for their various impersonations, but for managing their delightfully phony tour of the globe with such brio and resourcefulness. This is wised-up, post-Brechtian theater: The actors and the audience are accomplices from the get-go, and the performers' clowning always includes an implicit admission that, after all, they're only pretending to be fighting Apaches, smoking opium, swaying on a steamer. And we don't mind for a minute; we're enchanted by their inventiveness, and joyfully wondering what they'll do next. Who needs "realistic" drama when artifice can be so thrilling?
The story of Around the World was known — in a somewhat altered form — to most Americans in the mid-'50s, when the film starring David Niven won the Oscar for Best Picture, and added a signature hot-air balloon that never figured in Verne's original. For those who came of age later: Phileas Fogg is a punctilious 19th-century Englishman who bets 20,000 pounds that he can circumnavigate the globe in a mere 80 days. Along with his French servant Passepartout, he sets out to use the latest transport technology — mainly railroads and steamships — on a circuit that will take him from London and back, with stops in Suez, Bombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco and New York. But along the way, he faces all sorts of obstacles, from an English detective who's sure he's a thief on the lam, to bad weather, missing railroad tracks, an Indian suttee and a blizzard. Perhaps his greatest problem is relentless Detective Fix, whose aim is to arrest Fogg on British territory — at a time when much of the world passes for British territory. And there's another problem: Because Fogg has to spend much of his fortune on his travels, loss of the wager will mean his utter bankruptcy. Eighty days may wind up being a couple of days too many.
The five actor-magicians of the FST production take us on this exciting journey with the help of Marcella Beckwith's wonderful period costumes, a few noise-producing props (for train sounds and steamboat whistles), several chairs and a table and a couple handfuls of white gunk to represent a snowstorm. And they really move: lurching along on a train, staggering to keep their balance during a storm at sea, swaying and bumping on the back of an elephant, and even whistling by on an American sledge captained by a malodorous mountain man. A sign jutting from one wing tells us whether Fogg is ahead or behind schedule, while a chart from the other wing details his would-be itinerary. And though our attention is mostly on Fogg and his travails, poor Passepartout wins our attention as his shoes are stolen in an Indian temple, he's tricked into smoking opium by the ubiquitous Fix, and he's captured by Apaches in the still untamed West. In fact, main character or not, Fogg is just too damned proper to win more than our admiration, while Passepartout, played for maximum comedy by the hilarious Brad DePlanche, is the real stand-in for the audience, a flustered Everyman whose expressive face asks again and again, "How did I ever get into this?" Fogg may hold the power, but by the end of the evening DePlanche/Passepartout owns the show.
Which is not to underestimate the other four splendid actors. As Fogg, Dan Matisa is the epitome of Victorian manhood: fearless, emotionless, ready for anything and everything — except romance with the lovely Aouda, the Indian woman played so affectingly by Mahira Kakkar. While Matisa exudes sobriety, Kakkar plays Aouda with a deep and persuasive solemnity; from a sense of indebtedness to Fogg (who rescues her from certain death), she passes almost imperceptibly to love, an emotion with which sturdy Phileas is, to say the least, uncomfortable. When Matisa and Kakkar are alone together, the play's comedy gives way to a fascinating clash of silences, of British reticence versus Indian reserve. But it doesn't last long; because Eric Hissom as Detective Fix is usually somewhere nearby, hatching another plot with which to finally bring Fogg to justice. Hissom's Fix is one of those characters who's so funny because he's so sincere, because his monomaniacal pursuit of oblivious Fogg leaves him exhausted and exasperated but never defeated. Finally, Sheffield Chastain, who plays a great many parts including the play's Narrator and an American colonel, turns in creditable work. He may not have any roles that compare with his four colleagues, but his transformations are pivotal in keeping the journey colorful.
Which brings me to the real unseen hero of Around the World: Director Russell Treyz. While some directors do little more than manage onstage traffic, this one pulls off one theatrical tour de force after the next, convincing us at one moment that we're in the smoky chambers of the London Reform Club, then getting our passport stamped at Suez, then sleeping in the monkey-filled Indian jungle. Bob Phillips' set is, as I've said, mostly bare, though it's relevantly backed with maps of the Western and Eastern hemispheres. And Marty Vreeland's lighting eloquently guides us through 80 days and nights of variable weather.
See this satisfying work. It'll reawaken you to the imaginative possibilities of the stage, and make you laugh, and even touch your heart. It has no redeeming social value, no serious core, and still it's enchanting. If you had any doubts about the health of live theater, this will put them to rest: If a clever director and a talented actor tell us we're in Hong Kong, that's precisely where we are. And the same goes for Yokohama, and out at sea during a typhoon. The live theater can take us anywhere at all.
And that's a claim that even CNN can't make.
This article appears in May 17-23, 2006.
