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Theater Review |

Cheers to Stone Soup Theatre for the sake of opening its prepare and its brand unused space with a top-notch lengthening of two Tom Stoppard one-act plays. The new Downstage Theatre, correct a couple doors away from the original interval, is two times as broad, seats 60 nation and provides a greatly expanded stage and a lobby.

The absurdist “After Magritte” opens the program. It offers hilarious proof that perception and memory are not always to be trusted.

Reality is not necessarily the kind of we perceive.

Mother wakes up on an ironing provision as daughter-in-law picks bullets from the floor, while husband in fisherman’s waders struggles to unscrew a light bulb. Then begins their seemingly insane encounter with a police examiner. Only now, Mother is playing a tuba and the now elegantly clad couple ballroom dance around the stage.

Director Mary Machala has masterfully paced this craziness to reinforce the delight of each unexpected happening. Courtney Bohl and Matthew Middleton play the couple with spot-on British upper-class hauteur, making their bizarre circumstances uniform more humorous. Aaron Ousley as Inspector Foot is bumbling arrogance played to wholeness. And it’s totality done on a set that’s straight exhausted of a Magritte surrealistic painting.

None of this preposterous yet outrageously funny behavior seems to make sense. Amazingly, by game’s conclusion, everything that had appeared to be totally born imbecile is explainable. And isn’t that more than a bit like the vital spark?

This is one of Stoppard’s early works (1970), produced after Monty Python first appeared on BBC and well for Eugene Ionesco dazzled audiences by his surrealistic plays. “After Magritte” has a bit of both of them within it; but Stoppard has never been averse to building on the ideas of others, and few bestow it since well as he.

“The Fifteen Minute Hamlet,” directed by Roger Tompkins, is to slapstick what “Magritte” is to absurdity. It’s played by a group of merry-andrew clowns in cabaret costumes. Hamlet is a leggy blond bombshell (Kat Schroeder). Gertrude (Nick Mathews) is wearing a beard and husky. The set change between the two plays is the chiefly creative I’ve ever seen.

So keep your eye in succession Stone Soup. It has begun the become seasoned in fine form.

Nancy Worssam: nworssam@earthlink.net