On Baylor Theater's "The Thirty-Nine Steps"

Comedy is a question of timing and surprise, and Baylor theater pulled off an excellent parody of the English mystery genre a la Agatha Christie by riffing through a jazzed up version of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Thirty-nine Steps." Slapstick may be the oldest form of comedy, Adam slipping on a banana peel, appealing to the audience's lowest sense of what might be acceptable to laugh at. Good comedy is a tender thing, but it depends on the audience recognizing itself within the context of the work. This script takes a serious dramatic work, one of suspense and intrigue, and turns it inside out. The success or failure of the comedy depends heavily on the jaded nature of the audience who must bring to the theater an enormous amount of pre-programmed baggage or experience with the spy-intrigue-drama. In other words, the audience expects certain things to happen, and the comedy happens when those things do or don't happen the way they are supposed to happen. The comedy duo of Ross and Ramirez rock the world of the play by blowing up every convention, undermining every discourse, and by subverting all communication within the "normal" world of straight-men Herndon and Montgomery, who do their almighty best to play their roles as if they were normal people in an English drama of manners. Parody only works well when the genre being parodied is thoroughly and completely worn out, and "The Thirty-Nine Steps" in the original source material by Buchan and Hitchcock is already highly parodic of the mystery-intrigue world, so pushing this theatrical adaption into obvious parody is dangerously thin ice that might only be traversed by comedians with no shame and no repressions. Of course, the comedy works because the comedic duo of Ross and Ramirez morphs into dozens of characters and situations where the audience plays along, happy to see their beloved conventions of mystery and drama break apart into a million little pieces. The comedic duo, Laurel and Hardy, Martin and Lewis, or even the Marx Brothers (trio), depended entirely on the underlying comedic nature of tragedy and the human condition. Since tragedy and comedy always co-exist as a Janus-like doppelganger, a drama of intrigue and suspence blows apart when the script no longer takes itself seriously and undermines the entire world of the theatrical production and the imaginary "fourth" wall is ignored with a wink and a nudge. When the parody takes over and the audience gives in to the laughter, the tragic nature of comedy kicks in and the audience loses itself in belly laughs, laughing until it cries. There is no question that an audience of today has not been overly stimulated by television, movies, youtube, the internet, but the bigger question is how does a script and theatrical production take advantage of that critical cynicism? The script, of course, is not enough. The success of tonight's production rests wholly with the director (Denman) and his actors as they interact with each other, the lighting effects, the sound effects, and a great supporting cast that did its best to never let on that they were playing their roles straight. The joke is simple if you let it be a joke. A burned-out genre full of cliches and overused tropes, aging motifs and tired characters, the theatrical version of "The Thirty-Nine Steps" is Hitchcock a lo loco, suspense and horror turned upside down, an entire genre subverted, playing to an audience that is aching to laugh because their lives are too serious. Watching the clowns shift between characters makes the tears sting a little less, makes the bitterness a little easier to tolerate, makes personal tragedy a little less dramatic. Medieval authors were often fond of saying that too much seriousness makes a man (or woman) boring, sick, tiresome. Tonight's comedy was like a breath of fresh air, delighting the soul and enlightening some tired minds. Horace would have laughed and loved it.