William Congreve’s The Way of the World is a convoluted comedy revolving around the breeding habits of a small group of 18th-century rich people, who navigate the manners and social protocols of the day to win the hands of their true loves when they aren’t trying to steal the fortune of a wealthy aunt. There’s a more detailed, spoiler-laden synopsis in the program, as well as a family tree, but that’s all you really need to know. Even without the synopsis, it’s obvious the lovers will get together in the end and the aunt’s riches will be kept from the conniving clutches of Congreve’s unscrupulous villains. No doubt in 1700 the peculiarities of the plot and the myriad allusions to the politics of the day must have resonated with Restoration audiences. In 2009, we must content ourselves with Congreve’s marvelously witty prose and the uniformly excellent performances by a cast that throws itself into the production with ambition and abandon.
The Way of the World is going to be a long (three hours, including a pair of 10-minute intermissions), brash and noisy farce regardless of who’s at the helm. In the hands of Rebecca J. Ennals, it is a particularly rollicking and randy affair. Breasts overflow their cinched bodices, men prance like peacocks or stagger drunkenly about, servants pulls strings behind the scene for their masters, couples cannot keep their hands off each other. It’s great fun, a lot of laughs and thanks to the fast pace and terrific acting, the hours fly by.
The play actually begins rather unpromisingly with a gimmicky prologue that Ennals has rewritten to draw parallels between Congreve’s money-grabbing wretches and the celebrity-obsessed, paparazzi culture of today. Clad in deliberately dissonant costumes, whose flourishes swing wildly from historical to contemporary, the company raps their lines as they pretend to read from tabloids — the headlines have been reworked with the names of the characters we will soon meet but don’t yet know. There is, I’m sure, a connection between Congreve’s players and Brangelina, but I found this linkage between events three centuries apart to be a bit of a stretch.
It does not help Ennals’s case that the first scene between Fainall (Alex Kirschner) and Mirabell (Joseph Salazar) conversing in a chocolate shop drops the Restoration-celebrity connection entirely. Instead, we get a blizzard of words. Beautiful words, beautifully spoken, to be sure, but I had a difficult time following the anecdotes these two men were sharing as my ear adjusted to the vernacular, the rhythms of Congreve and the odd, similar-sounding names of his characters. As near as I could tell, Fainall, a cad, is married to a woman he does not love. Mirabell, not a cad, longs for the hand of a woman whose wealthy aunt he has offended, thus dooming his chances. We listen closely, straining to follow the plot.
Anticipating this early challenge for her audiences, Ennals has the rest of the cast pose behind a scrim to create tableau versions of the action the two men are describing. The goal is to better familiarize the audience with the characters and the play’s copious backstory. It mostly works.