How to Stage a Sex Farce on a Shoestring

Ghost Light Theatricals' The Beaux' Stratagem (at TPS, through April 20, $12) has confirmed a suspicion we've been harboring for a while: If you're a small theatre company with a shoestring budget, a perhaps less than desirable venue, and a cast of talented actors you want to showcase, you need to be doing a farce. Because The Beaux' Stratagem is two-and-a-half hours of thoroughly enjoyable theatre, featuring a talented cast and good use of limited resources, for a damn fine ticket price.

George Farquhar's 1707 Restoration comedy is a ribald sex-romp that follows two London men-about-town with declining fortunes into a tour around the English countryside, where they intend to go town to town, alternating roles as a nobleman and his valet, and sucker star-struck young women into profitable (for them) marriages—whereupon they will acquire the young women's fortunes and then move on to the next town.

Ghost Light's choice of an all-female cast is, thankfully, little more than a chance to showcase some wonderfully talented actors, rather than an attempt to explore gender (unless one counts the fact that having women delivering the lines blunts the play's rabid misogyny). The setting (updated to the 1920s) works well, particularly with the cross-dressing casting, and the designers make great use of the company's fringe-level budget.

With a cast of eighteen, space simply doesn't allow for giving full credit where credit's due. Michelle Flowers as Francis Archer—the London rake posing as his friend's footman—dominates the stage; Flowers manages to spit out Farquhar's rapid-fire dialogue with amazing ease, while her frenetic performance keeps the play well-paced.

As Archer's more romantically inclined friend Thomas Aimwell, Liz Moisan seems to have based her characterization on swaggering movie heroes like John Wayne. Jessica Stepka's performance as Boniface, a morbidly-obese innkeeper with a fondness for strong ale and an allegiance to a gang of highwaymen, is a work of comic brilliance. And as Boniface's comely daughter Cherry, the lovely Anna Richardson achieves electrifying chemistry with Flowers.