A Perfect Wife

By Brian Wilford
Citizen Staff, February 3, 2007

February is the month of love, Valentine's, bluebirds singing, spring in the air, a perfect time for the Chemainus Theatre Festival's A Perfect Wife.

Here we find love, unlikely, improbable love, witty love, antagonistic love, madcap love. Chemainus veterans Jeremy Tow and Norma Bowen have adapted plays from Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) and George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and a short story from Trevanian (the pen name of Dr. Rodney Whitaker, 1931-2005) to create a series of four playlettes within a play on the meetings of men and women and their haphazard paths to matrimony.

As can be expected, given the lifetimes of the playwrights in particular and the ultimate destinations of marriage, the themes and values are old-fashioned.

Norma Bowen and Anita Wittenberg portray strong women who, though intelligent and independent, are nonetheless committed to the landing of a man.

The men, played by Bernard Cuffling and Craig March, seem to more stumble into these things, behave awkwardly and somehow luck out.

That sort of thing doesn't happen anymore, does it?

It begins with Wittenberg, wonderfully histrionic as a Russian widow, justifiably offended when March barges in, demanding payment of a debt owed by her deceased husband. They screech and bellow their way closer and closer, aided by some deft and charming slapstick from Cuffling as the widow's manservant.

Playlette two, 30 years down the road, is less rambunctious and more focused on the wit of dialogue between Bowen and March, who through words find their way from antagonism to attraction.

About 30 years later, Wittenberg, a brash and determined shop clerk, pursues Cuffling, a curmudgeonly travel writer, in what is really a wonderful piece of character development in a such a brief turn onstage.

Some 30 years after that, Cuffling is intent on proposing to Bowen, his farming neighbour, but nothing goes as planned until Bowen sits him down and straightens him out. In getting there, Cuffling is amazingly over the top and Bowen wonderfully hayseed. Kind of like Hee-haw on steroids.

The actors really pull together A Perfect Wife and make it work, with Tow and Bowen allowing a lot of room for veteran stagecraft to shine.

They are aided by an ingenious set, which, with modest alterations, is a mansion, a train, a steamship, a shop, a farm and more. This is aided by wonderful lighting and sound  the passing train windows are really quite brilliant.

The costuming, long a strength of Chemainus Theatre Festival productions, is in this case pivotal in that it advances both the plot and the characters over a century of fashion.

This is a production which, perhaps because it's original and 'local', doesn't have a lot of glitz and hype attached to it but maybe it should, because it's really very good. Make a point of seeing it before it ends March 24.

And, if you want to make a real evening of it, the gourmet buffet in the Playbill Dining Room, featuring apple- and date-stuffed roast pork, is exceptional.

A Perfect Experiment

By Peter Rusland
News Leader Pictorial, February 3, 2007

Viewers were willing guinea pigs for a farcical experiment that worked during Thursday’s Chemainus Theatre premiere of A Perfect Wife.

Script doctors Jeremy Tow and Norma Bowen found common threads in four different plays about love’s attraction and successfully stitched them together in Wife.

The conclusion may be that finding the perfect wife or husband is the mirage of marriage.

Wife uses plays by Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, and Trevanian (alias Rodney Whitaker) whose world stage premiere of his work happens in Wife.

The collective script traces several generations of clever, demanding women originating in 1865 Russia and ending on a 1955 Saskatchewan farm. The moral may be to marry a person you love talking to.

Tow’s four-member cast uses six scenes to depict the chatty battle of the sexes through a feast of expression, wit and pitch-perfect vocals.

Act one (Chekhov’s The Bear) sees a Russian widow (Anita Wittenberg) catching her man (Craig March) amid comical bumbling from servant Luka (Bernard Cuffling).

Wittenberg’s snake hissing and March’s frustrated snarling accompany a priceless scene where Luka ends up under his mistress’s hoop skirt.

Act two from Trevanian’s The Engine of Fate matches strangers in a carriage (Bowen and March) in 1899 Paris.

Scene two’s bistro scene is also a jewel as the two actors probe issues of social equality and the bluff and fakery of courtship posturing.

Act three (Shaw’s The Village Wooing) offers vacationing shop clerk (Wittenberg) on a Red Sea ocean liner in 1928.

She meets a workaholic travel writer (Cuffling) and reels him in when he visits her shop in England.

Their daughter is Bowen’s Canadian farm maid, niece of March’s farmer. He’s asked for her hand by Cuffling’s chaotic neighbour in Wife’s silly version of Chekhov’s The Proposal.

Open ears can follow the plot through this comedic creation showing us our lives are coincidental farces on various levels.

Jerod Fahlman’s multi-layered set and Kendra Cooper’s period costumes get an A+.

A Perfect Wife runs until March 24.

Farcical play rating: 8 quips out of 10.