Theatre in Review: The Heir Apparent (Classic Stage Company)Theatre in Review: The Heir Apparent (Classic Stage Company) David Ives continues his bid to be the hot new playwright of the 17th century with The Heir Apparent . A couple of seasons ago, The School for Lies, his very free adaptation of The Misanthrope, dazzled with its audacious wit, successfully crossbreeding the sensibilities of two distinct centuries to create a new-style screwball comedy. This time out, he has adapted Le Légataire Universel, by Jean-François Regnard, an all-but-unknown figure today who was nevertheless in his time hailed as Molière's successor. Once again, Ives has come up with passage after passage of intricately rendered, gag-laden verse, creating a kind of verbal slapstick that has no peer at the moment. But, possibly because he is working with an inferior source, The Heir Apparent , which plays like a cruder Molière pastiche, grates as often as it amuses. The caustic insights of The School for Lies have been replaced by a mad, scrambling, anything-for-a-laugh approach that proves far less satisfying. At the center of The Heir Apparent is Geronte, a wealthy old coot who is forever teetering on the edge of the grave. As the lights come up, he is once again not dying. As Lisette, one of his servants, coolly notes, he is "hoarding breaths like francs." Lisette is getting tired of constantly attending to her master, as she tells her roguish colleague, Crispin: I irrigated him both fore and aft.
He popped up blinking, did a quick pavane,
And hopped a polka to the closest john. CRISPIN
Ironic talent, making dead men dance. LISETTE
I'm high colonic mistress of all France. Crispin is planning on securing a place for Eraste, his master and Geronte's nephew, in Geronte's will, thus allowing Eraste to marry the winsome Isabelle. The plan goes awry, and a newly invigorated Geronte ("It's nothing that a trip to Lourdes won't fix") decides to marry Isabelle himself. Because he wants part of Geronte's bounty, Crispin hatches a series of ever-more-desperate plans, impersonating two of the old man's minor heirs, an American nephew ("Bon giorno!/Is this here Paris, home to whores 'n' porno?") and a niece, tragically widowed and the mother of ten. ("Then when he's dead two years, to top our sins/Out pops a complimentary set of twins! ... Oh Cyril was virile.") Despite the fact that Crispin is played by the peerless Carson Elrod, both of these sequences are more effortful than amusing. Rather better is the scheme that follows when Geronte appears to die and Crispin, disguised as him, tries to dictate a new will. Of course, Geronte once again escapes his bed of pain, putting both men through a bit of the famous mirror routine from Duck Soup. But again, Ives doesn't seem to know when to quit, and the sequence goes on and on. In general, the humors of The Heir Apparent are marked by a coarseness that, combined with various aggressive attempts at audience participation, creates an atmosphere where desperation, rather than laughter, reigns. We hear far too much about Geronte's problematic intestines. Every so often the action stops for generic spoofs of steamy French movies, a series of gags left over from some old 1950s revue. The imperious Madame Argante, Isabelle's dowager mother, is made to break character and remember her youth, when she smoked weed. Painful puns abound. Crispin, dressed as Geronte, spits and says, "You've read my memoir? Great Expectorations?" To be sure, the hard-working cast members, as directed by John Rando, get their laughs from those who are willing to get high on this helium silliness. But you're just as likely to feel fatigued by their relentless attempts at inducing amusement. Elrod is one of the best young comic leading men in New York right now, and he has his moments here, especially when Crispin lapses into the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V before hatching another plan. But, for the first time in my experience, he's working too hard, and it halves the fun. "I am a one-man Comédie Française!" Crispin says at one point, working overtime to make sure we get the joke. As Geronte, the always-priceless Paxton Whitehead makes the most of his material, even when forced to enter complaining about the size of his last bowel movement. Claire Karpen's Lisette has a nimble way with a clotted speech describing Geronte's many ailments ("You who're asthmatic, rheumatic, and myopic/Smegmatic, aspermatic, misanthropic/Sclerotic, cirrhotic, phlebotic/Thrombotic, neurotic, necrotic"), delivering the diagnosis in double-time. Dave Quay and Amelia Pedlow are perfectly okay as the standard-issue lovers; Pedlow has a nice moment when, inflamed by news of a rival, she whips out a switchblade. Suzanne Bertish lends her considerable hauteur to the role of Madame Argante, especially when denouncing her late husband ("That pillar of the church, that foe of whoredom/That undisputed lord of bedroom boredom"). David Pittu makes quite an entrance, walking on his knees as the tiny, but august, lawyer Scruple, but he has almost nowhere to go after that. It all unfolds on a stylish set by John Lee Beatty, a skeletal depiction of a drawing room filled with Geronte's many possessions. Japhy Weideman's lighting adds an extra bit of polish and sparkle to these frantic proceedings. David C. Woolard's costumes withstand being repeatedly donned and discarded; he has also designed a pair of sumptuous gowns for Madame Argante and Isabelle. Nevin Steinberg's sound design includes some tasty jazz and French pop selections plus an unfortunate gag in which Geronte's clock makes a farting noise each time it tolls. Without question, there is an audience for this sort of nonstop gagging; many of them were at the performance I attended. But coming so soon after the ultra-sophisticated hilarity of The School for Lies, it's hard to see The Heir Apparent as anything but a letdown. Any time you have to be told this insistently to have fun, something is wrong.--David Barbour 
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