Messy, madcap, fun farce

Forget about that stuff on Page One - the burning issue of the day is much more demanding, and it comes as multiple choice: Just who is Leslie? Is he:

(a) a punk with perfect hair spikes who is teetering outside a window ledge of St. Andrews Hospital?

(b) a wheelchair-bound patient who walks perfectly when he dashes for the booze in the doctors' common room?

(c) a man who came into the hospital with gout, was operated on for hemorrhoids and suddenly keeled over from heart failure?

(d) a living, dead or re-resuscitated dog?

(e) all of the above?

Whoops, I've misplaced the teacher's guide. And even if I hadn't, I wouldn't free the identity of the real Leslie. Why spoil the sheer madcaptivity of It Runs in the Family, which plays out on - or spills all over - the stage of Hedgerow Theatre in Rose Valley? With theater, sometimes everything's an intolerable mess; It Runs in the Family is pure farce, so the messier, the merrier.

Hedgerow's producing artistic director, Penelope Reed, stages this with all the requisite arm-pulling, head-banging and cross-dressing, but she also insists on character-building, and her cast has the timing, talent - and temerity - to make lines such as "Ahoy in front! Avast behind!" work for all their punnish worth.

Set in Zoran Kovcic's purple-shaded doctors' lounge in a London hospital, the comedy's premise is simple enough: An up-and-coming doctor is about to give an important speech any minute to a group of physicians meeting at the hospital.

Pandemonium breaks out as he puts the finishing touches on his notes. It's pop-in comedy: In comes one doc, who bugs him; another, with dumb concerns; a former nurse, an old flame who is about to ruin his life. And in comes Leslie, whose true identity is whipped into a hasty pudding of deceits by our young doctor, trying to save his skin.

Anthony Marsala is wonderfully tortured as the doctor, and the rest of the large cast gleefully makes his life miserable. In an evening of standouts, one performance, by the same Zoran Kovcic who has done the scenery, leaps over the top - in this case, praise. With hangdog cluelessness, Kovcic plays a doctor put in strange and rollicking situations, each more outrageously funny than the last.

The farce itself is mildly amusing the first half-hour, then funnier by stretches as it convolutes the stage. Hedgerow has made the ridiculous British farce a trademark, just as People's Light in Malvern has appropriated the zany British panto. This is Hedgerow's sixth production by playwright/actor Ray Cooney, who has written 26 plays. I doubt that anyone gets it any better in Britain.

Written by Ray Cooney, directed by Penelope Reed.

Cast: Anthony Marsala, (Dr. Mortimer), Newton Buchanan (Dr. Connolly), Zoran Kovcic (Dr. Bonney), Charmaine Gates (matron), Spencer Gates (Sir Drake), Carlyn Miller (Jane Tate), Susan Wefel (Rosemary), Jonny Long (Leslie), Giselle Chatelain (nun), Brian Gallagher (sergeant), James K. Hulme (Bill), Maggie Flynn (mother).

Playing at: Hedgerow Theatre, 64 Rose Valley Road, Rose Valley. Through Sept. 9. Tickets: $23 to $25. 610-565-4211 or www.hedgerowtheatre.org. EndText