A Web of Lies, A Charming Farce at Sunset Playhouse

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Photo Credit: george katsekes jr.

The French farce Don’t Dress for Dinner is a tightly written comedy. Actors play characters that are forced to play many roles in a story in which everyone has a different reason for being untruthful. Sunset Playhouse does a pretty good job of delivering the script’s complexity in its latest production. Keith R. Smith and Tyler Peters play Bernard and Robert: a couple of guys caught-up in a complicated web of lies as they stumble through duplicitous relations with a wife, a cook and a mistress in a country home northwest of Paris. Modulations in the more sophisticated end of the script’s intricacies may be lost to Smith and Peters, but they’re charming enough to serve as the central gravity for the cleverly dynamic comic aggression ricocheting through the rest of the cast.

Lori Nappe is charismatically formidable as Bernard’s wife Jacqueline, who is at first too busy with her own extra-marital affair to notice her husband’s infidelity. Ella Folkerts brings an appealing dominance to the edges of the ensemble as a cook who is hired to put together a single meal and quickly finds herself involved in matters beyond the kitchen. Allison Chicorel is smartly comic as Bernard’s lover Suzanne, who comes for dinner only to find herself reluctantly thrust into the role of cook. Chicorel has particularly strong grasp of the wit of the script in a role that could easily get lost in the bewildering shuffle of everything. Nick Zuiker rounds-out the cast as the cook’s husband who is looking to pick-up his wife to bring her home.

Through May 6 at Furlan Auditorium, 800 Elm Grove Road. For tickets, call 262-782-4430 or visit www.sunsetplayhouse.com