INDOORS, OUTDOORS.(plays House, Garden)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 03-JUN-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

I spent a lot of time during Alan Ayckbourn's manic but sodden comedy "Garden," now playing at the Manhattan Theatre Club's Stage II, trying to think of clever ways to combine the words "farce" and "snooze," but it was no use--the only combinations I came up with were about as satisfying as the play itself. And it had all sounded like so much fun: "Garden" is linked with another Ayckbourn play, "House," which is not only set at the same time and place--a late-summer day, at an English country house where a garden fair is to be held--but is running simultaneously with "Garden," on M.T.C.'s main stage, with the same cast. (Theatregoers can see the plays, in either order, on different nights, or see them both on a weekend afternoon and evening, or they can see one play in the afternoon, give their evening tickets away, and go see "Spider-Man.")

Ayckbourn, who has written more than sixty plays--roughly double the output of the prodigious Neil Simon--has toyed with time and space and offstage action before, but "House" and "Garden" are the apotheosis of his experimentations. Needless to say, performing these two plays presents an unusual challenge for the actors, who literally have to run through the lobby--where the production supervisor sits with a stopwatch and coordinates...

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