APT's 'Fallen Angels' is Slapstick in Lipstick

Michael Muckian, Shepherd Express

The genius of American Players Theatre is that the talented company can often take the merest bit of theatrical piffle and turn it into a glittering jewel of performance. This is especially true with drawing room comedies, and APT succeeds again with Noel Coward’s Fallen Angels. The 1925 farce speaks of love, lust and alcohol less from the heart than from somewhere somewhat lower on the human anatomy.

Coward’s plot is sit-com simple. Posh socialites Julia and Fred Sterroll (Phoebe González and Nate Burger, respectively) and their close friends Jane and Willy Banbury (Laura Rook and Sam Luis Massaro, ditto) find themselves five years into their respective marriages with something less than happily-ever-after on their minds, at least for Julia and Jane who drive the narrative. The men’s solution is a golf weekend just outside of London, leaving their wives to stew—and get stewed—over what could possibly happen if their lives took another turn.

Enter the specter of Maurice Duclos (Ronald Román-Meléndez), the one-time lover of each of them, Julia in Pisa and Jane in Venice. He has sent each of the women a postcard announcing an upcoming London visit and expressing his interest in seeing each of them again. “Swoon” is not a strong enough word to describe the women’s reactions to what might happen, again.

Playwright Noel Coward once said, “It’s never too early for a cocktail.” In Fallen Angels, that happens about a third of the way into the first act. Or maybe sooner. From then on, the narrative teeters into slapstick in lipstick, sometimes newly applied, later terribly smeared. But it’s all part of the fun, driving the women into their inevitable reunion with their former paramour.

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