Last Saturday, Mer and I went to Akron to Actors’ Summit theater, where we met up with our friends Nate and Rachel. We were there to see a French farce play, Ladies’ Man. I have only seen a few farces (comedies that are way-over-the-top ridiculous), but I have enjoyed the ones that I have seen, so I was pretty eager to see this one.

The play started out fairly slowly. For about half of the first act the play was merely amusing, rather than laugh-out-loud funny. It took its time setting things up. Then, once all of the relationships were in place, the play got really, really funny for the rest of Act One and for most of Act Two. There were lots of misunderstandings, innuendos, doors slamming, plays-on-words, funny accents, and more, and I had a great time. The play climaxed about ten minutes before it ended, and the play ended a bit flatly, but the ending was needed to wrap up all the loose ends.

The play was more or less this: an older doctor has problems performing in the bedroom with his young and beautiful wife. So, he goes out to the Moulin Rouge with another woman and contemplates an affair to see if he can get his vigor back. He backs out at the last minute; his would-be mistress is still desperate for him. The would-be mistress has a very jealous husband who thinks his wife is cheating on him. The young wife finds out the husband was out all night and assumes he has a mistress, so she calls in her overbearing mother for help. Add in a couple of servants and a family friend who tries to help, and all the comedic elements are in place.

The actors did quite well. The would-be mistress was amazing – sultry and brazen, she was a lot of fun. The doctor was the same actor who had played the lead in Becky’s New Car, a play he in which he shone. In this role, he was just okay – his slower pacing and speech was great as the older man in Becky’s, but lacked some of the zippy timing this play needed. The butler was played by a wonderful actor who plays Actors’ Summit quite often, and he did a great job as the manservant to the doctor. The young wife was played by a fine actress, but her voice and mannerisms were all very American, and so it was a bit hard to see her as a young French woman from the 1800s.

The set was mostly open with five doors, which allowed for maximum mayhem later in the play. The center of the stage generally held furniture and other items needed for each scene, and there were only two locations – the doctor’s home, and a former dressmaker’s shop, which had recently doubled as a brothel.

All in all, a very fine play. All four of us laughed quite often. After the play, we all walked over to a nearby and fairly fancy restaurant where we had dessert. It was decent food, but the $8 price tag for a brownie with a little ice cream was too steep for me to want to go back on a regular basis – I like Friday’s version better – it is much bigger, and two dollars cheaper. It was still a nice extension of the evening, and we got to catch up with Nate and Rachel, which we hadn’t done in a while. We found out that they are expecting child number two sometime in October, and we got to hear about Nate taking full advantage of a breakfast buffet over the course of an hour and a half. Nate is very funny, and it was a very fun evening. Laughter was the theme of the evening, and that is a great way to spend a Saturday.