Word: ayckbourn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...central device in Alan Ayckbourn's Communicating Doors is a portal between hotel suites that carries women who step through it either 20 years forward or 20 years back in time. This idea may seem offbeat even for a farce, but it is not surprising from a man whose nearly 50 other plays involve such tricks as a robot spouse used in a child-custody battle; audience choices that provide a script with 16 endings; and a three-story house seen on one level (with actors tiptoeing up and down -- that is, back and forth -- along imaginary stairs). "Games...
...FIRST SCENE OF WILDEST Dreams, a new tragicomedy staged by its prolific author, Alan Ayckbourn, for London's Royal Shakespeare Company, four unhappy middle-class people are enhancing dull lives with a homemade role- playing game a la Dungeons & Dragons. They speak pseudo Old English mingled with gobbledygook as their revealing fantasy characters -- a woman warrior for a young lesbian, a lizard with strange powers for a pimply computer nerd, a wise old seer for a tedious teacher and a princess who speaks in tongues for his faded, flustered wife -- obsess about visions and quests...
...Ayckbourn has placed the action on three sets that fill the RSC's small stage and position the actors mere feet, if not inches, from the audience as they portray over-the-top derangement. All are good, and the two nuttiest -- Gary Whitaker, as the youth who comes to believe he is an alien, and Brenda Blethyn, as the neglected wife who regresses into toddlerhood -- rip open psychic dungeons to unleash dragons of despair...
...Ayckbourn unleashes dragons of despair in Wildest Dreams...
...Comedy relies on the gimmick of pretending that lights are out when they are on, so people stumble about in unintended sexual tangles while the audience chortles from the superiority of being able to see. It's possible to beguile audiences while amusing oneself with a formal problem -- Alan Ayckbourn does it all the time. But Ayckbourn remembers that comedy derives best from believable characters and situations that arouse empathy. However crowded Shaffer's stage, there's nobody home...