Local actor and director Pat Murphy has for years suggested that Citadel Theatre include the British farce “It Runs in the Family” in one of their seasonal lineups.
Murphy got his wish this year. The show, which Murphy is directing, opened Nov. 19 in Lake Forest and will run on select Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays through Dec. 18.
“Audiences have a tendency to like comedies,” said Murphy, who served as director of theater for 35 years at Glenbrook North High School.
“They especially like something associated with a farce. They’re not exactly the same as a regular comedy. Farces have to deal with a plot that is very convoluted,” he said. Often, a character spends the entire play trying to get out of a tricky situation.
“The instant he thinks he’s solved one thing, something else comes in. It’s just this constant sense of action and fun and complications,” Murphy said.
French farces were popular at the end of the 19th century, and British farces soon followed. These typically included infidelity as part of the plot, Murphy said, adding making a farce work requires major attention to timing, detail and movement on stage.
“It Runs in the Family,” written in 1987 by Ray Cooney involves a physician named Dr. Mortimore who is preparing to give a lecture, one that will raise him and the hospital where he works to a higher status. Enter the first problem. A woman with whom he had an affair 18 years ago walks into his office while he’s practicing his lecture and gives him some “interesting news.”
“She tells him the reason she left was she got pregnant and she had a son. She told the son his father had died falling off the Himalayas,” Murphy said. When her son turned 18, she decided to tell him his father was a doctor at the hospital. The boy gets drunk and goes to the hospital to find his father and ends up getting arrested. In the meantime, Mortimore talks another doctor into saying he’s the boy’s father.
“You have lies. You have lies to cover up lies and lies to cover up the cover-ups. It’s this madhouse of stuff happening,” Murphy said. Some of the play’s scenes include a nurse getting stuck in her arm with a sedative and the 18-year-old climbing onto a snowy ledge. Oftentimes with farces, some characters impersonate someone else, and that happens in this play when two characters pretend they’re the same person and end up on stage at the same time.
“The show is not like a drama with a heavy scene. Maybe it suggests don’t have affairs or don’t lie about it or be more careful,” Murphy said.
But more than anything, it’s funny, he said. “It gives the audience a chance to get pleasure out of watching other people’s pain. You can come to the show and not deal with your problems, but watch somebody else with problems, trying to solve them.”
Murphy said for farces to succeed, actors need to have impeccable timing and move precisely through the stage’s space.”Often times in a farce, there are certain looks or someone is doing something physical that is slightly larger than life,” Murphy said. “All this needs rehearsal and practice and repetition. So much of humor rises out of the timing. You look too early or too late or you don’t pause long enough and the joke or the humor won’t work.”
“In some scenes, people are running around, someone is pushing someone through a door, someone is wheeling a person a gurney. There’s a lot of action that has to happen like a machine, so it doesn’t feel clumsy,” he said.
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Murphy is a veteran actor and director with Citadel Theatre, where he directed “The Fantasticks,” “A Christmas Carol” and “Death Trap,” among others.
Murphy directed more than 100 productions at Glenbrook North before retiring; some of his former students now act in shows he directs.
‘It Runs in the Family’
When: Nov. 16-Dec. 18; previews at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 16 and select Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays; 1 p.m. matinees Nov. 23 and Dec. 5
Where: Citadel Theatre, 300 Waukegan Road, Lake Forest
Tickets: $20 for previews, $45 all other dates
Information: 847-735-8554, citadeltheatre.org
Sheryl DeVore is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.