Theater Review—

‘The Lying Kind’ Continues Quality, With Added Hilarity,

Of TheatreWorks

By Julie Stern

NEW MILFORD — The house opened early on the opening night of TheatreWorks New Milford’s production of Anthony Neilson’s The Lying Kind, and patrons who took their seats were treated to some twenty minutes of soft, tasteful carols, while gazing on a restful stage set showing the twinkling façade of a London townhouse conventionally decorated for Christmas.

Thus it isn’t until the play actually begins that the audience realizes that, in keeping with its tradition of serving up mordant, unsentimental anti-saccharine fare for the holidays,  TheatreWorks has something special in store.

Neilson’s play – a “police farce” about two bumbling bobbies who have the unwelcome task of bringing the news to an elderly couple that their only daughter has been killed in a car accident on Christmas Eve – has been described variously as a mixture of Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, The Marx Brothers and Monty Python, with dark undertones, and lots of R rated language.

Keir Hansen and Thomas Libonate are Police Constables Gobbel and Blunt, who must carry out this last assignment before they can go home for the holiday weekend.

Their reluctance to ruin Christmas for the old people causes them to spend most of the first twenty minutes in an Abbot and Costello routine over who is going to ring the doorbell.

What was starting to get old is broken up by the appearance of Beth Bonnabeau-Harding as Gronya, a  formidable, fatigue clad vigilante searching for newly released pedophiles in the neighborhood so that she can “fix” them.

Here the staging of the play requires some very uneven time divisions. The first act is only twenty minutes long, so that the scene can be switched to the interior of the Connor house, which has enough doors, chests, and strategically placed windows to let it become the farce it had always intended to be: Gobbel and Blunt are not the sharpest knives in the drawer but they are, above all, determined to be kind. To that end they begin to tell kindly lies.

Things happen: The old lady has intermittent periods of dementia, requiring everyone to pretend that they are officers on a cruise ship. There is some confusion over whether it is the Connors’ daughter or their dog who has been killed, leading to a wrestling match between Gobbel and an angry Chihuahua, as seen through the French window, and the need to conceal the dead animal under his tall English bobby’s hat.

A vicar (Jonathan Ross) arrives who, for various reasons, ends up being crammed in a wardrobe, so that when a teenager (who is looking for her missing Chihuahua) turns up she has to be hidden in a chest on the other side of the room.

Mr Connor has a bad heart, and must be protected from any sudden shock….

And Gronya comes back, with her “tools,” convinced that these cops are planning to help a pedophile get away – which in her book makes them equally culpable...

Is all this actually funny? You bet, because the actors , a collection of TheaterWorks veterans, are really good. Jane Farnol is weirdly dotty as Mrs. Connor,  Beth Bonnabeau-Harding is scarily menacing, John Taylor is properly wispy as the Milquetoasty Mr Connor, and Maggie King, who was a sultry Nell Gwynn in Compleat Female Stage Beauty back in October, is a truly sullen teenager. Above all, the play is carried by the two policemen, especially Mr Hansen.

His body language and facial expressions are so funny that at one point (and this was the only time there were any lapses) the other players on stage with him lost their composure and burst out laughing – along with the audience. In this reviewer’s opinion, he is a lot funnier than Laurel and Hardy and those other guys ever were.

(Performances continue on weekends until December 31, with a New Year’s Eve gala performance scheduled for that evening.

Regular tickets – Friday and Saturday evenings at 8, and Sundays, December 10 and 17, at 2 – are $17.50; the New Year’s Eve performance, which will include hors d’oeuvres and open bar, are $35.

Call 860-350-6863 for reservations and additional information.)