Are drunk people funny?
“I don’t think so,” Kelli O’Hara said, pointing out that she last appeared on Broadway in “Days of Wine and Roses,” a musical about the terrible damage done by people who drink to excess.
Yet she and Rose Byrne are currently delivering one of the funniest drunk scenes (and follow-up hangovers) in recent stage history.
The women star in “Fallen Angels,” a 1925 Noël Coward play in which two wives get tipsy and then full-out snockered as they await the arrival of a Frenchman they each had an affair with years earlier. In the Roundabout Theater Company’s revival, which will stream on June 5 on Broadway HD, the two Tony-nominated stars stagger about, get twisted in a phone cord and fall over furniture.
Still, O’Hara explained, the pratfalls are not in themselves the source of the comedy. “What’s funny,” she said, is “the loosening”: the unwinding of control and dignity among people who value both highly. Here are some of the ways she and Byrne — under the direction of Scott Ellis, and with the help of costumes, sets, sound, wigs and props — achieve that.
Just a Tiny Drop
Coward doesn’t specify how much the women drink or how soon they get drunk, but Byrne said, “We tracked it.”
In Act 2, after their husbands have left for a golf weekend, Julia (O’Hara) and Jane (Byrne) fill the time as they await the arrival of their mutual Frenchman by sipping Champagne in oversize coupes. Soon, having chugged a whole bottle, they start on a second. There are also martinis, straight up with a twist, and a sizable aperitif of Medoc. “And we’re barely eating,” O’Hara added: just one oyster each by the first cork pop. (The oyster is actually yellow Jell-O.)
Drinking is a playwright’s best friend, a dramaturgical accelerant. Where would “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” be if its treacherous foursome were teetotalers? Still, every actor must decide whether the alcohol is meant to help a character suppress feelings or let them out. “Even in a farce,” O’Hara said, “what are the stakes?”
What aren’t? Julia and Jane drink at first because they are too excited about their impending guest. Then because they are too nervous about what they will do with him. Then because: Which of them will he like more? Then: Why hasn’t he shown up? And — by now at half-mast: What if a tree blew down and killed their husbands on the links? Cue the boozy wailing.
By the end of the act, Ellis said, both women must be drunk enough to detonate the collapse of their friendship. For him, the job was to delineate that decline, step by woozy step. Only with grounded motivations could the comedy fly.
Smoke, Darling?
Key to tracking the collapse is a series of Act 2 gags that are carefully set up in Act 1. One involves the rituals of smoking. The first time Julia lights cigarettes for herself and Jane, she does so politely and efficiently. Once they’re inebriated, though, the process becomes an elaborate skit in which Julia is so blitzed she cannot locate the tips of their cigarettes. This goes on for a stage eternity of up to 40 seconds, the laughs growing wilder as the women, trying to lean into the flame, nearly topple to the floor. The physical joke is built on the emotional one of women perseverating in a hopeless attempt to maintain decorum.
In rehearsals, Ellis recalled, the bit started out very short. But O’Hara and Byrne kept finding new ways to extend it, and over the course of the run kept it growing. So far, Ellis added, he has not had to rein them in.
The gag is enriched by a visual non sequitur, courtesy of Kathy Fabian’s props. In Act 1, the cigarette holders are just a few inches long. By Act 2, O’Hara’s seems to extend past her arm. Clocking the change, you feel that you are drunk.
Sorry, Wrong Number
Physical comedy as an expression of competition is as old as the Romans. In Ellis’s staging of “Fallen Angels,” competition is symbolized most succinctly by the telephone, which delivers a series of calls to Julia’s apartment. Could it be their Frenchman?
At first the women jockey to answer. Then, as their inebriation reveals their motives further, they flat out fight over the receiver, caterwauling into it even when they win. (It’s not the Frenchman.) At one point, Jane tries to walk away but Julia yanks her back by the cord. From such gestures, which Coward barely hints at, salient points are made. Julia and Jane need to stick together, if only to keep either of them from moving ahead solo.
Watch Your Step
The phone tangle leads to a series of pratfalls, mostly for O’Hara, whose history of serious Broadway characterizations adds to the surprise and delight of a major comedy role.
So when she falls down the stairs while attempting to climb them at the end of Act 2, what we laugh at is her fall from grace. Her curtain line, spoken to a servant as grandly as she can muster, is “You may clear away now, Saunders. That was delicious.” It is not especially funny on the page, but immediately following the tumble it brings down the house.
That’s in part because the tumble is not finessed or faked. O’Hara wears no protective gear. “I will admit I have many, many scratches and stuff,” she said. But on the bright side, she added, “they’ve sanded the staircase.”
There’s Got to Be a Morning After
What goes up must come down. During a thunderstorm the next morning, at the start of Act 3, Julia tops her Act 2 up-the-staircase fall with a hangover encore as she tries to descend.
Coward mentions no stairs. “I asked for them,” Ellis said, “not knowing what I was going to do with them.”
The set designer David Rockwell provided a glamorous flight that seemed to beg for comedy. So before a performance one night, Ellis suggested that O’Hara fall down it. She got the laugh, but requested additional motivation in the form of more thunder. A few well-placed booms from the sound designer, John Gromada, made Julia’s morning-after jitters sing. The clingy, hooded, silk crepe day dress designed by Jeff Mahshie enhanced the effect, making her look like a Martha Graham dancer.
“Actually, it’s my homage to Tim Conway,” O’Hara said. “Have you seen that video of him as an old man falling down the steps in slow motion? I grew up on that.”
Mahshie designed hangover elements for Jane as well. When she returns to Julia’s apartment after a night in a cheap hotel, the lush ostrich-feather fan she held so flirtatiously the evening before has been reduced to what looks like a dead cockatiel. And of course a hangover is always a disaster for the coiffure. The wig designers, David Brian Brown and Victoria Tinsman, play up Jane’s downfall with a towering hair-fail masterpiece.
The accumulation of these elements — design, staging, motivation — lifts “Fallen Angels” into an almost abstract plane of insanity as the drawing-room comedy becomes full-on farce. By the time Jane winds up cowering in a corner, her dress bedraggled and her hair looking terrified, the foundation of facts has given way to sheer wonderment at human peculiarity.
Vanity of Vanities
But wait, it’s not over. When the husbands (Christopher Fitzgerald and Aasif Mandvi) return, and the Frenchman (Mark Consuelos) finally arrives, the women are trapped in the mortifying consequences of their grand machinations.
Their solution: Go grander. Yet each step further along that path makes them more ridiculous.
Both actresses agreed that the way to make intoxication funny is to play the opposite. At one point, Jane, barely able to stay upright, inches across the stage with the care of a tightrope walker. “Especially when you realize you are drunk,” Byrne said, “you’ve got to really pull in and control yourself.”
For Coward’s fallen angels, who care so much about the appearance of dignity, that means trying to maintain their standing even as they collapse. In the end, that’s the high.
Jesse Green is a culture correspondent for The Times.
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