ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR
Charles Dickens knew what he was about when he set his best-known ghost story on Christmas Eve. If Christmas is the occasion for jovial generosity and reconciliation, it’s also the spookiest season, a cold, grim, reflective time when we’re haunted by memories of old failings and unresolved conflicts. The flip side of the merriment A Christmas Carol celebrates is the sad, scary soul-searching that overtakes Scrooge in the middle of the night: fear as much as anything else makes him become a better man.
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Absurd Person Singular is set at a trio of cocktail parties; Ayckbourn specifies the time as “last Christmas, this Christmas, and next Christmas”–or Christmas past, present, and future. Though Ayckbourn’s three sociable couples think they keep the holiday with presents and parties, their lives are in thrall to a miserly materialism every bit as soul destroying as Scrooge’s. While the men plot to make money at other men’s expense (occasionally turning their conversation from business to extramarital affairs), their neglected wives retreat into private sanctums of depression: Ronald Brewster-Wright is a snooty banker married to blowsy boozer Marion, and Geoffrey Jackson is a handsome architect and self-described “sexual Flying Dutchman” whose wife Eva is hooked on pills.
When Jane runs in through her own front door disguised as a delivery boy in act one, it’s more than just manic fun: it’s a foreshadowing of the third act, when Jane and Sidney barge in through the Brewster-Wrights’ back door–the rear entrance people like the Brewster-Wrights have forced people like the Hopcrofts to use through history. Only this time the Hopcrofts are in charge, quite literally calling the tunes to which their former superiors must now dance.
Where Ayckbourn mines comedy from the reality of modern life, in his farces Ray Cooney relies on tried-and-true stereotypes dating back to commedia dell’arte and Roman comedy. Though not as viscerally funny as Out of Order, the Forum’s previous Cooney production, It Runs in the Family creates passable entertainment out of a man trying to stave off disaster and only inviting it. On the day he’s to give a career-making speech, Dr. David Mortimore is visited by a nurse with whom he enjoyed a brief dalliance 18 years ago–or, more precisely, 18 years and 9 months. Now she’s returned with Mortimore’s illegitimate son, an antisocial, leather-jacketed punker intent on meeting his father. Desperate to avoid exposure of his adultery, Mortimore enlists his colleague, Dr. Hubert Bonney, to pose as the lad’s dad, invoking the nonexistent ethic of “doctor-doctor confidentiality” and setting in motion a series of escalating absurdities.
