"The Underpants": Skilled Seattle cast fills out Steve Martin's sex farce

If ever a title and an author could sell a show, the comedy now on at ACT Theatre could.

It's called "The Underpants." And though it is based on a 1911 one-act by German playwright Carl Sternheim, it has been adapted for American consumption by writer and film star Steve Martin.

One should not approach this broadly comedic one-act as one might, say, a "wild and crazy" Steve Martin skit for the old "Saturday Night Live" gang. Or one of Martin's droll short fictions for The New Yorker, or even his first play, the arty comedy "Picasso at the Lapin Agile."

Part outrageous sex farce and part prophetic satire, Martin's version of "The Underpants" tries to bridge a great cultural chasm between our own era and Sternheim's.

It doesn't do that.

But the crew of expert farceurs undertaking Kurt Beattie's well-oiled, slapstick-laced staging are so determined to tickle you, they make a case for "The Underpants" through sheer, dogged hilarity.

Dipping into an apparently inexhaustible stock of facial double-takes, Julie Briskman plays Louise Maske, the wide-eyed young wife of the coarse government bureaucrat, Theo (Richard Ziman).

Louise is just another oppressed Dusseldorf hausfrau, until she has a lingerie malfunction at a royal street parade. The accident not only enrages her status-conscious spouse, it also inflames the libido of many male witnesses.

Two such men show up at the shabby-genteel Maske home (designed by Carey Wong) as prospective boarders. That's when the farcical gears start turning, as Louise tries to evade the sweaty clutches of the older lech, Benjamin (played by David Pichette), and plot an assignation with the younger, more dashing Frank (a proudly unpublished poet, played by Matthew Floyd Miller).

Martin has said he set out to Americanize "The Underpants," by shifting the arch German tone and focusing more on Louise's heady brush with fame than on the bigotry, ignorance and incipient fascism of Germany's petty bourgeois.

Fortunately, Ziman's take on Theo's smug anti-Semitism and Neanderthal chauvinism is so noxiously funny, it's also disturbing. One can easily imagine Theo going for Hitler, two decades later, in a very big way.

The other actors also make the most of what they have to work with. As a zany neighbor feeding voraciously on Louise's sexual predicament, Marianne Owen uncannily locates the laugh in nearly every line she utters.

Miller does a 180-degree turn from the haunted writer he played in ACT's "The Pillowman," pulling out the stops as another sort of literary type — the idiotic Byronic poseur.

Briskman gets more distress, lust and poignancy out of Louise than one has any right to expect. Wesley Rice has a terrific cameo as a misanthropic codger. But humorous as he too can be as Benjamin, Pichette periodically crosses the line between mugging and gobbling the scenery.

Whatever its small flaws, ACT's production carries the day. But it's easy to imagine that, in lesser hands than those of Beattie and company, Martin's "Underpants" would be a flimsier piece of dry goods.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com