‘Scandal’ needs schooling in comedy

One of the scandalous things about “School for Scandal” is how it strains for laughs. Dry-eyed through a tragedy, you can endure, but not cracking many smiles during a comedy is particularly insufferable.

All the ingredients for laugh-inducing theater are present and accounted for in the Folger’s production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1777 farce about blue-blood gossipmongers and social climbers. The plot is a dizzying minuet that skewers geezers who marry much-younger women, frivolous rich wives who will do anything to stay “in fashion” and the endless thirst for delicious rumor.

Director Richard Clifford has assembled a dream cast, which includes deft comedians David Sabin, Kate Eastwood Norris, Tom Story and Catherine Flye. However, other than Miss Flye’s wickedly funny turn as a lisping flibbertigibbet — who deludes herself into thinking she hasn’t an unkind bone in her body — and Mr. Sabin’s measured wiliness as a codger completely flummoxed by the idea that his nubile wife (Miss Eastwood Norris, criminally underused) might have married him for money, the cast just seems to flit and flop carelessly about the stage.

Tony Cisek’s sumptuous scenic design takes a few cues from Whistler’s Peacock Room as well as adding other gilt flourishes pertaining to the production’s setting, the late 19th century — the time of Oscar Wilde, Gustav Klimt and Edith Wharton. This gilded, over-the-top era also is reflected in Carol Bailey’s costumes: a flurry of lace, feathers, velvet trousers, tasseled tams and elaborate embroidery.

Allusions to Wilde also can be detected in the green carnations sported by some of the male characters, the emphasis on bons mots and spontaneous poetry and, perhaps most important, in the casting of Mr. Story as the tittle-tattling Lady Sneerwell. The part of Lady Bracknell in Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” is often played by a man in drag. The problem with “School for Scandal” is that the Wildean touches do little and seem like surface embellishments, increasing neither the wit nor the understanding of human nature in the play. Mr. Story does not do the noble profession of drag queendom proud as he portrays womanly wiles with brittle rancor and delivers every line with a whinnying gasp that would send Lypsinka screaming on stilettos into the night.

The second act is an improvement upon the first, which seems so belabored with exposition you don’t know whether Sheridan intended for the play to be entertainment or a Restoration variation on waterboarding. Watching the gossips and hypocrites get their comeuppance provides fillips of rollicking enjoyment, but there is also an air of sanctimony about it that spoils the party mood. “The School for Scandal” is truant in laughs and satiric insight into the foibles of high society.

**

WHAT: “The School for Scandal” by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

WHERE: Folger Theatre, 201 East Capitol St. SE

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Through June 15.

TICKETS: $34 to $55

PHONE: 202/544-7077

WEB SITE: www.folger.edu/theatre

MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS