It’s a farce, I tell you!

Your Humble Blogger has been thinking about farce. About actual farce, that is, not travesty or debacle or Senate Hearings. Farce.

It occurred to me that the reason there are a lot of backstage farces is that in order to write a farce in a particular setting, it helps to know that setting very well, and most playwrights have a good deal of backstage experience. Oh, and it’s a farcible setting to begin with, of course, but there are lots of those. For a setting to be farcible it must have a) at least three doors/exits, and the more the proverbial; II) a reason for lots of people to come in and out fairly frequently, and 3) a plausible way to ratchet up the speed and the stakes so that the play builds in intensity and excitement. Backstage during a play does that very nicely. Also a house, particularly a dinner party or country weekend, and there are plenty of those. Hotels, particularly in a suite with connecting rooms, plenty of those. I was trying to think of other farcible settings.

The front office of an elementary school seems to me to have possibilities, although one would want to avoid having actual children on stage for very long. Still. Door to a bathroom, door to the corridor, door to the outside, door to the Principal’s office. Easy to come up with ways to build pressure. The usual way is the visit from Outside Authority, so the superintendent, possibly with a parent activist of some kind, or possibly coincidental with an opposed parent activist. The whatsit, a term I’ve just invented to describe the prop that goes from hand to hand faster and faster as the farce descends, is a bit tricky, as it’s likely to be a file folder or envelope. The whatsit, of course, is usually a set of identical or near-identical whatsits; the epitome of this is the three identical suitcases, one full of money, one with a bomb, and one filled with lingerie or something similarly embarrassing. Having a file folder as a whatsit is all right, as there are a nice variety of potential contents, but they aren’t intrinsically funny. The ideal whatsit is a costume piece, a policeman’s helmet or a priest’s collar, worn by a succession of characters impersonating, increasingly pathetically, their proper owner.

A restaurant kitchen, for instance, is a lovely spot for a farce, and the whatsit can be a chef’s hat or a maitre-d’s jacket. Door to the dining area, door to the street, door to the meat locker, door to the pantry. A restaurant in a hotel is even better, as you can have a separate entrance for the room-service carts, and of course the uniformed bellhops. I don’t know of any farces set in hotel restaurants, but I’m sure there are some. But to write one, you would have to either have worked in one yourself or do some research. And who wants to do that?

My last idea before I throw the floor open to suggestions is a chemistry laboratory. Here’s what I’m thinking: two researchers, rivals at the same R&D co., he’s … let’s see … Simon Sillicothe, and she’s Blair Brophy. Each has a crush on the other, but they won’t admit it. Blair’s research assistant is Marcus Mondebourg, Simon’s is Wendy Weisenzweig; they are actually having an affair, but neither of their bosses know. Also, Wendy is a spy for a rival R&D co, and Simon a fraud of some kind (fake CV? Criminal record? Nephew of owner?). The outsiders who come in are a beautiful but very confused animal rights activist and a representative from a funding foundation. Also, they are expecting a … postdoc? Some sort of temporary colleague from overseas, who neither Simon nor Blair has ever seen. I’m also thinking there is a super-efficient administrator (playing against type) who instantly comes up with explanations for every ludicrous situation the funding-wallah walks into. The whatsits are a lab coat, of course, and a set of test tubes (or whatever is actually used in chemlabs), one with a ludicrously expensive something-or-other that is the last of the substance in the country and is needed for the display for the funding-wallah, one brought by the animal activist which she says has a virulent nastythingy to show the sadistic vivisectionists what it’s like to be experimented on, and one with … I don’t know. Maybe only two of them, but with a whole stage full of empty and/or harmless ones. The actual set would be a display lab, set aside for impressing funding-wallahs and administrators, with a door to the corridor leading eventually to the outside, a door to the administrators’ offices, a door to Simon’s lab, a door to Blair’s lab, and a door to a supply room. Possibly all three lab rooms are on stage, with a portion of the two labs shielded by a screen (perhaps Blair’s has a cot, as he works late, and Simon’s has an illicit garden or a kitchen or some such).

My point is that if I were trying to write that farce, I would have to do some research. Not that such a setting is realistic, and I would have to make the whole thing realistic to go with it. Far from that. No, I’d have to know a lot of vocabulary, know what people would carry themselves and what their flunkies would carry, know about ID badges and lab coats, know whether it would be funnier to have an stupid funding-wallah or a clever one, know whether it would be funnier to have the lab experiments work or fail, and if they fail, what’s the funniest way to have them fail, and if they work, what’s the funniest way to make the working unexpected. To know what would make the characters comically surprised, and what preposterous nonsense they would comically accept. Oh, and mobile phones. It would be good to have a reason to get people’s mobile phones away from them. Anyway, it would be far too much work for a playwright to bother with, so that one will have to wait for a lab techie with time on her hands.

So, Gentle Readers, what’s a farcible setting in your life?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.