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April 15, 2005 > Arts & Entertainment > Alley presents saucy but tangled ‘Underpants’

Alley presents saucy but tangled ‘Underpants’

By Sarah Betts | Thresher staff

When one sees Steve Martin’s name above the title The Underpants, one immediately thinks of comedy. The star of Father of the Bride, with his talent for physical humor and slapstick jokes, would surely see a play about a woman whose panties fall off in public as a great excuse for a hilarious and bawdy romp. Though Martin’s version of German playwright Carl Sternheim’s 1911 satire Die Hose leaves no innuendo unexplored, it also flirts with some weighty and difficult issues in between jokes about erectile dysfunction. Although the mix of comedy and critique is interesting, the play is ultimately confusing.

Sternheim’s version was a satire of German bourgeois morals, and it was banned in both imperial and Nazi Germany. Though The Underpants is probably not destined for such censure, its jokes about gender conflict, sexuality and anti-Semitism are edgy enough to create discomfort.

The fairly simple plot centers around a mishap suffered by housewife Louise Marke (Alyssa Rae) — whose pants involuntarily drop in public at a parade — and the suitors she receives as a result of the incident. Louise, an innocent newlywed, is initially scandalized by the amorous attention but soon becomes very interested in having an affair, while her husband Theo (John Tyson) cannot get over his own embarrassment.

This play is about sex in all senses of the word. In the Maske home, gender regulates all activities. Theo’s masculinity is expressed by his steady job, his provider role and his tendency to command and nag Louise. Likewise, because of her sex, Louise is locked in her house all day. Once married, Louise’s sexuality is a matter of indifference to Theo — they will have sex once they have the money for children, and her attractiveness is an evil because it compromises his respectability. The panty incident is an example of such embarrassment, and he chastises her bitterly, bellowing, ‘You are much too pretty for a man in my position.’ He blames the sluttish persona created by the panty drop on her femininity. Tyson tries to deflect some of Theo’s abrasiveness by making him so incredibly sexist that he is an object of humor. While Theo’s rages are often amusing and absurd, sometimes they are just tragic, such as when he tells Louise the only dreaming she should do is about cleaning the dishes. Rae wrings the full pathos out of Louise’s pathetic situation — she meekly accepts Theo’s abuse and is painfully eager for any affection.

Louise begins to get some long-awaited attention from the two suitors who rent rooms in her house after the panty escapade, and the suitors bring with them most of the play’s funniest moments. Todd Waite’s Frank Versati is a ridiculous poet who looks like Seinfeld’s Kramer dressed in Oscar Wilde’s clothes. He brings out what Martin called the ‘underappreciated egghead’ side of his comic style with witty wordplay and parodies of classic poetry. Although fairly raunchy in tone, some of the jokes in Underpants are unexpectedly highbrow, with references to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado and Nietzsche and a wonderfully inappropriate aria from Wagner sung by the second suitor.

Jeffrey Bean is Benjamin Cohen, the Jewish barber who shows up to ensure Versati doesn’t get Louise all to himself. Cohen tries, with his bowler and vest, to hide his yarmulke and prayer shawl, and he quotes enough Wagner to pass himself off as ‘a good German’ in Theo’s terms. But jokes based on his transparent attempts to conceal his religious background fall flat. Cohen’s hypochondria provides a showcase for Bean’s considerable talent in physical comedy, but the anti-Semitism of the other characters is awkward. Such humor is difficult to find funny, especially in an adaptation of a play by a German Jew forced into exile by Nazi persecution.

Gertrude Deuter (Elizabeth Heflin), a nosy, middle-aged spinster who lives above the Maskes, is the most forthrightly comic of the play’s figures. Heflin portrays Gertrude’s salacious interest in her neighbor’s prospective affairs with so much gusto that scenes with Louise and Gertrude often seem to be about Gertrude’s desire for a lover, not Louise’s.

The plot technically places Louise in the position of being courted by two strangers, but the women in Underpants buck sterotypes and lust after the men only to be consistently disappointed. Martin suggests that the male characters become so involved in the pursuit that they forget the object and that women serve only as imaginary goals. Subsequently, the play largely ignores the women’s more concrete desire for sexual experience. Such oblivious sexism and assumptions about women’s desires by the male characters adds another complicated social commentary that renders the play’s comedy even more difficult.

The Underpants is certainly funny, but it is not really a comedy. Despite the never-ending sequence of jokes, the actors’ enthusiastic attempts at caricature and a stage that looks like a Looney-Tunes version of Imperial Berlin — complete with fluorescent lighting effects — the play comes off as schizophrenic. It takes much of its humor from serious social issues but is not pointed enough to be satire. The slapstick comedy cannot really override the impression that the issues at stake in the play are not meant to be humorous.

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