September 23-29, 2004

theater

The Underpants

by Toby Zinman

Steve Martin is a funny man. The Arden cast is full of funny people: Jen Childs, who has perfected the hand-on-bosom deadpan glance at the audience (only Jack Benny did it better); Scott Greer, who thunders around with comical stolidity; Jeff Coon, who orates to beat the band with flashing eyes; David Howey, whose tic-ridden heel-clicking had me wishing he had a larger role; Joe Schulz, who has collapsible legs; Ericka Kreutz, who walks the fine line between sentiment and self-parody; and Tony Lawton in a Dr. Strangelove knockoff with the limpest of wrists. Director Aaron Posner has provided absolutely Swiss timing. It's a funny night.

But it's not a falling-down hilarious night, or a particularly interesting night, because Carl Sternheim, the early-20th-century German playwright who wrote the original play Martin adapted, is, well, an early-20th-century German playwright. His satire of the bourgeoisie doesn't translate very well, culturally or temporally, and the play's focus flits around from early feminism to fleeting celebrity.

The preposterous plot begins when a modest young wife's underpants fall down around her ankles while watching the royal parade; she feels, to her astonishment, "a welcome breeze in the netherworld." Men notice this event and are so titillated that they flock to her doorstep to rent the couple's spare room. She is so titillated by their titillation that soon the place is crackling with desire, aided by the upstairs neighbor's vicarious lust ("Deception, lying, trickery: My little girl is all grown up!")

There is no way to contemporize the play because the concept of enormous bloomers, puffily covering from waist to knee, has no equivalent in this thongish world, where even the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe with her skirt blown upward is nostalgic rather than sexy. If there are no social limitations there can be no scandal; if there are no sartorial limitations, there can be no tantalizing glimpse of anything not already hanging out.

The German husband, a methodical, unromantic government clerk, is unaware of the heat his boarders are generating, and although the play flirts with naughtiness and infidelity, it is as bourgeois as its very own government clerk, endorsing, finally, the family values of a hundred years ago, which turn out to be much like the family values government clerks (or their boss) endorse today.

The Underpants Through Oct. 31, Arden Theatre, 40 N. Second St., 215-922-1122