Bed Check

By T.E.K.

13 RUE DE L'AMOUR

by Georges Feydeau

A Feydeau farce should look like an old silent movie runoff on a modern projector. The characters must move and gesticulate as if controlled by a crazed puppet master and appear always to be running into each other, often at the least advisable moment. The production of 13 Rue de l'Amour at Manhattan's Circle in the Square comes creditably close to the Feydeau tempo and spirit, but it is difficult to orchestrate an arena stage to that crescendo of forbidden doors being opened and closed on which Feydeau depends.

A Feydeau plot is both intricate and indecently funny. The people are bourgeois and very much married; yet adultery is their chief goal and interest in life. In l'Amour, Moricet (Louis Jourdan), a doctor, lusts after Leontine (Patricia Elliott), wife of Duchotel (Bernard Fox). On frequent "hunting trips" Duchotel is cheating on Leontine with the wife of a friend.

Birabeau (Laurie Main), who is an inanely unsuspecting cuckold. All the key figures converge on a kind of maison d'amour run by the lecherous Mme. Spritzer (Kathleen Freeman). There they are beset by an 1890 version of the Keystone Kops who have a devil of a time trying to fathom the traffic flow.

While Feydeau whisks his characters about with a wand of madness, he also displays surgical detachment in dissecting the foibles of the French middle class. The men tend to be pompous hypocrites. The women seek out opportunities for sexual revenge but are coy about entering the beds they have promised to grace. Not exclusively French, is it?

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