Dan Lombardo took a few minutes to chat with us about Boeing Boeing today. After threatening to do the entire update in mime, he gave up the goods....
Dan: Today was great. We’re doing some improvising to get scenes even funnier. I wish someone could look at some of this and say “no, that’s not anywhere near over the top” because I want it to go almost over the top, and then go over the top. At this point nobody can come in the room because everybody’s still trying out different stuff and throwing furniture.
WHAT: You’re not throwing actors are you?
Dan: We’re just swinging them, not actually throwing them.
[Boeing Boeing] is one of the funniest modern farces that has ever been done. And that’s an anomaly because I don’t think modern farce can be done anymore. How do you do farce anymore? It’s been done for hundreds of years. Can we still laugh at all of these absurd situations that are so unrealistic. It’s the “falling down on your face” kind of humor, where there’s mistaken identity and complete misunderstanding. The characters don’t know what’s going on but the audience does. You can dissect the farce into its minutest details and piece it back together and it’s all a formula. But the way a great farce is done – and this is one of them – is so fresh and different. You bring new actors to it every time and the actors come up with fresh ways of doing it. It can be utterly hysterical.
We think of modern theater as being so sophisticated and being cutting edge - we’re proud of being cutting edge - but we’re also proud of being able to open up those places in human beings where the laughter just comes out, regardless of age or background.
This is a play where that happens. It’s a French play. It was written in French. It was first done in Paris in 1960. Why in 2011 can we do this play in English and it’s still utterly hysterical? It hits on all these universal yearnings. The universal recognition that we’re all pretty pathetic and, and that’s the bottom line. When you put that together in a modern play, like Boeing Boeing - it happens at the end of the age of Beat-era hipsters with bongo drums and French berets, it’s them and the Frank Sinatra rat pack “we’re so cool, we drink martinis and smoke and have women on each arm.” Just at the edge of that and the complete turnaround of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement and the jet age - you put all that together and you get a world that speeds up out of control. The guys in this play think they’re cool and hip and they can manipulate these wonderful flight attendants, and fool them and nobody’s going to be the wiser – and it all goes haywire. By the end of the play they get their come-uppance in a really hysterical way. I’m not going to describe what that is, but believe me, you go into this play thinking “hey, these guys are really dinosaurs.” They’re from the age of the very first James Bond film – 1962 is when the first Bond film came out. That suave, debonair guy who gets all the women, kisses them and then pushes them out of the helicopter and it’s all fine. This play turns that on its head by the end. The women make utter fools of the men in a completely hysterical and believable – not believable - way. But a complete, on a soul-level believable way, where all the classic elements of farce are there - the doors-slamming, people tripping. We don’t actually have pants falling.
When we did Noises Off, that was the first time this theater company said “we’re going to do a play that’s strictly funny with no redeeming value other than it’s cutting edge-ly funny." Jeff and I were in the audience one night when a character dropped his pants. It got the biggest scream of laughter I’ve ever heard in any WHAT venue (other than the children’s theater, WHAT for Kids). We both looked at each other and smiled. It’s like, this is not bad to make people laugh that hard. There’s something huge about making people laugh so hard they lose themselves. It brings in a universal compassion. It brings us down to the very essence of people sharing the best thing about being alive. No other creatures can laugh the way human beings can laugh.
And that’s why I love directing Boeing Boeing, and why I’m dying to get as many people in to see this. You laugh because you see yourself in this play. You love these characters and you love the struggles they have. It’s all struggles about love, ultimately. And what’s better than that?
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