Word: stoppard
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...play trips down a path paved with jokes on foreign phrases, sight gags with panties, and tongue-twisting lists of pub names. Stoppard's ear for the curious-sounding proper noun is responsible for many of Dirty Linen's laughs; but between this dependence on the odd British name and the peculiarly British obsession with both perpetrating and denouncing scandalous activity, the play poses special difficulties for American performers. The Winthrop cast meets its challenge with modest skill, and no pretense of doing anything more than presenting a funny play. The script plasters over its mediocre theme with superficially brilliant...
David Dodds as Cocklebury-Smythe and Steven Ives as McTeazle, two M.P.s who arrive early for their committee meeting, kick off Stoppard's introductory exchange of foreign phrases somewhat awkwardly; these are strange lines to recite, and would benefit from a touch less caricature, a touch more natural ease. But both, along with their fellow committee members--played by Nick D' Arienzo, Anne Troy, and Tom Blumenfeld--quickly achieve a nice pace and a smooth ensemble, broken only infrequently by mistimed punchlines or fumbled bits of business with the many panties cluttering the stage...
Anne Walsh as Maddie faces a tougher challenge in fleshing out Stoppard's lightly sketched drawing of this bashful yet forthright, dimwitted yet wise "woman of the people." This character is difficult to play because Stoppard uses it as both a center-spring for the plot and as a mouthpiece for his moralizing, and the two are at odds. Walsh succeeds only half-way: her sluttish, gum-chewing, boneheaded secretary is so convincing that when she starts to write the parliamentary committee's draft report, you feel the words are coming from Stoppard--because you know they couldn't come...
...from New York to Chicago to San Francisco, from one cliche of 1930s America to another--Hell's Kitchen, Chicago newsmen, dustbowls, Okies and all. With a wild eye and a remarkable range of voices, Mann holds the audience's attention and summons into the theater the images in Stoppard's oration. The transition from Bernard's somnolent maunderings to Arthur's vigorous gesticulating ought to develop more gradually, however; by jumping head-first into his monologue, Mann loses an opportunity to scale the intensity of his speech in an upward arc, making this vastness of exposition more listenable...
...Found-Land trails awkwardly back into an epilogue to Dirty Linen, leaving everyone slightly disappointed. There are virtues in these plays, and New-Found-Land, especially, gleams with the special verbal artisanship that is Stoppard's genius. But there are so many better plays by this author that are as easily staged and as fully gratifying that Winthrop House's production seems like an act of needless mercy towards a play that deserves euthanasia...