ACT's "Intimate Exchanges": Adroit actors don't miss a trick

Theater Review |

Toby Teasdale is the hard-drinking, acerbic headmaster of an English primary school.

His mousy wife Celia is in a state of perpetual, dithering dread, waiting for Toby to get fired, their marriage to implode, or both.

That much we know about the two main figures in Alan Ayckbourn's 1982 comedy, "Intimate Exchanges." Beyond that, due to the intricate stratagems involved, any number of fates could await this couple — depending on which performance you attend.

No, the actors don't improvise. They work from a master script with eight discrete plays, and 16 possible endings triggered by seemingly small actions. Actions that jolt the lives of Celia and Toby into one trajectory or another.

ACT Theatre artistic director Kurt Beattie isn't trotting out all possible variations of the play. But on different nights, ACT is presenting four variants, staged by Beattie and wholly performed by two adroit Seattle actors balancing six characters between them.

The best reason to see this gimmicky theatrical contraption is to witness how local stage favorites Marianne Owen and R. Hamilton Wright switch sundry roles without missing a trick.

In "Version 1A" of the play, Owen starts out as dowdy, addled Celia, a housewife whose stress level piques her unlikely romantic interest in a slacker gardener and would-be ladies' man, Lionel Hepplewick.

The latter is portrayed by Wright with a broad working class accent, an absurdly over-confident swagger and a shaggy, Beatles-style wig.

Soon, however, Owen is alternating two parts, juggling Celia's anxiety attacks with the cheeky carping of the Teasdales' house maid Sylvie.

Meanwhile, Wright pops in and out as Lionel and his polar opposite, Celia's hubby Toby — a world-weary sort who regards his wife and nation with a congenitally British brand of withering disdain.

The actors handle their balancing acts deftly. But in the first half of "Version 1A," Ayckbourn's vision of middle-aged, middle-class ennui in Thatcher's Britain is not so sharply focused or richly humorous.

Things do pick up in Act 2, with the arrival of two additional English character archetypes, played with relish.

As the smugly oblivious old duffer Miles Coombes, Wright walks with a spry-stiff gait, and smilingly needles Celia as she attempts to launch a new catering business at a school festival.

Even funnier is Owen's dead-on impersonation of the insufferable local dowager, Irene Pridworthy.

With her regulation strands of plump pearls, straw bonnet, and ever-ready handbag (courtesy of costume designer Marcia Jory), Irene uses her barking laugh and invincible sense of authority to put lesser mortals in their place.

Meanwhile, Beattie smoothly orchestrates farcical feints that include getting Owen wrapped up in a tablecloth and stashed under a table, and having her re-emerge moments later from another part of the stage in a different guise.

An extended bit by Wright, about Lionel's bizarre baking skills, is also an occasion for mirth.

"Version 1A" ends on a sour note, and with a twist that jibes with Ayckbourn's jaundiced view of the state of bourgeois British marriage — though it's not quite believable otherwise.

At least in this chunk, "Intimate Exchanges" is more about Ayckbourn's clever set-ups than about the rueful social insights tucked into some of his other, many comedies.

It is the prowess of Wright and Owen that may entice you to check out one or two of the other destinies Ayckbourn has imagined for Toby and Celia. All four versions of the play are running in repertory.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com