Lantern Theater Company presents Marc Camoletti's 'Don't Dress for Dinner'

Like many farces, Camoletti's 1987 script — adapted into English by Robin Hawdon in 1991, a London hit running six years — deals with infidelity. However, its sexual content never surpasses innuendo. For example, sex between man and woman is referred to as "rogering." When a character says, “This sort of affair is easy for me,” she means dinner, but we hear sex.

To tell the truth

Lies are always a component of farce, and a dizzying number occur immediately in director Kathryn MacMillan’s fast-charging production. Camoletti’s relentless cleverness builds a perfect storm of falsehoods, each intended to stem the chaos but only adding to it. No one knows the whole truth — except us.

Bernard (William Zielinski) bids wife Jacqueline (Karen Peakes) farewell for the weekend. She discovers that Bernard has hired Suzette (Lee Minora) to make dinner and decides to stay. Her secret reason, however, is that Bernard’s best friend Robert (Marc LeVasseur) is coming, and he also happens to be Jacqueline's lover.

This foils Bernard’s secret liaison with mistress Suzanne (Jessica Bedford), so he implores Robert to pretend Suzanne is his own date. And we’re off!

Meghan Jones’s sleek, modern French farmhouse set has five doors plus a hallway exit, all the better to enable that farce staple: door slamming. The characters are perpetually in motion. Desperation is another genre hallmark. Everyone’s trying to stop imminent doom, which always means someone else discovering the truth.

On opening night, some performances seemed forced, to hammer home a quick laugh. Hopefully more subtlety will develop, although MacMillan favors big emotional reactions such as Bernard throwing himself on a sofa, pounding a pillow in exasperation. Already, Peakes’s assured performance reveals the fun earned through more natural reactions, as do some of Minora’s deadpan moments.

Conclusions

Some violence occurs in Don’t Dress for Dinner, expertly staged by J. Alex Cordaro with loud, smacking slaps, and it stays comical until the arrival of George (Chris Anthony), Suzette’s suspicious husband. His threats to kill his wife and her lovers, if she has any, as well as his thumping punches of the other men, don’t play today the way they did in 1991. Am I the only one who cringed?

Peakes especially shines in Don’t Dress for Dinner’s masterful conclusion. Camoletti has the characters create new lies to construct a common “truth.” Admitting adultery will destroy Jacqueline and Bernard’s marriage, so creating an acceptable story requires a Jengalike structure of new lies. Peakes’s Jacqueline brilliantly considers scenarios and then realizes the one problem in each, resulting in more and more lies before she’s satisfied.

Beyond the comfortingly predictable and typical relationship morality in Don’t Dress for Dinner are echoes of our society’s ongoing controversies about “truth.” Some people lie in desperate self-preservation; others want to believe the lies reassuring them that their world won’t change.

Don’t Dress for Dinner cleverly shows lies both causing and solving chaos, while reality instructs that ignorance is not bliss and lies are not solutions.