EVERETT – The Everett Theatre stage returns to its vaudevillian roots with the Neil Simon comic farce “Fools,” a joint production of the Everett Theatre Society and the Driftwood Players, directed by Gregory Magyar.
The show is full of silly one-liners in the vaudevillian style. Much of its humor turns around absurd literalisms (familiar to aficionados of the “Amelia Bedelia” children’s books), with exchanges like:
“You dusted this?”
“Yes, I put dust on it yesterday.”
or
“Would you like to kiss me?”
“With all my heart.”
“I mean your lips!”
As the play opens, schoolmaster Leon Tolchinsky (Travis Gamble), newly arrived in the village of Kulyenchikov, discovers a 200-year-old curse holds the villagers in the grips of idiocy. Can he deliver them from stupidity?
“To educate is one thing. To break curses is another,” he pontificates. Some of the brain-dead locals he discovers include Slovich the Butcher (Bob Nydegger), as well as Shepherd Snetsky (Michael Domingo), who pops his ears by blowing his horn. There’s also Mushkin the postal clerk (David A. Gallegos), the hobbled Magistrate Kupchik (Thomas Maier), and Yenchna the fishmonger (Cecelia Linsley).
Some of the show’s most entertaining scenes feature Dr. Zubritsky (Mike Way) and his wife Lenya (Geri Michele Silcox), parents of the teacher’s love interest Sophia (Erica Evans). The Zubritskys’ substantial cognitive dissonance leaves them struggling to even remember the name of their visitor’s profession. When he asks them the purpose of man’s existence, he doesn’t even expect an answer. They can only ask Tolchinsky what thinking is like.
Unable to make any decision on their own, Sophia’s parents put things in God’s hands, with such humorous prayers as “We know not what we do because we know not what we do.”
Count Gregor Yousekevitch (Thomas C. Phiel III) gives Tolchinsky only 24 hours to break the curse, at which time he will take Sophia as his own.
Sophia senses Tolchinsky’s frustration with her ignorance. Her reaction is wiser than anyone here seems to realize: “What’s the point of being educated,” she asks, “if you’re angry?” Much of what Sophia needs to know is summed up in lines like “The less you know, the better you kiss.”
Tolchinsky ultimately succeeds in freeing the villagers from their foolish ways, telling them “You’re only cursed if you believe you are.”
In the hands of Neil Simon, the transition from fool to thinking person becomes a real comic crossroads.
The Count, for example, asked what his plans are now that he’s intelligent, responds: “I’ll probably have to work.” And Slovich the Butcher, fretting over his future, says, “Suppose the curse is lifted and I find out I was dumb in the first place?”
Indeed, this comic fable will leave you pondering the meaning of wit and wisdom.
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