Mindless humor has its place

So few people laughed when the comedy “Murder at the Howard Johnson’s” opened on Broadway in 1979, the show closed after four performances. But when Acadia Repertory Theatre in Somesville staged it 10 years later, summer audiences couldn’t get enough of its purposefully mindless humor. If you renounce reason and fact, the reviewer for this paper wrote at that time, you can enjoy the “egregious spoofs.”

Some directors might have been tempted to call it quits with this script, written by the never-had-a-smash-hit comedy team of Ron Clark and Sam Bobrick.

But not Ken Stack, who has staged “Murder at the Howard Johnson’s” as the season opener at Acadia Rep. A sometimes sucker for summer schlock theater, he happily persists in boldly going where no director wants to – or should – go, and still comes up with the sneak-attack of laughs. It’s enough to soften even the most rigid funny bone.

“Murder at Howard Johnson’s” fits squarely into that genre of comedy that might be called S&M – that is, sex and murder all mixed up for grins and gags. Here’s the plot: The wife wants to leave the husband for the dentist. Here’s the twist: The lovers decide to murder the husband. I won’t give the second twist or the third. Suffice it to say that each of the three acts offers a killer variation on this menage a trois theme.

If you don’t have some approximate sense of exactly where this play is going by the end of the first act, then your punishment is to go back and watch every rerun of “Three’s Company,” “Love American Style,” and “The Carol Burnett Show.” You could throw in a few bad Neil Simon plays too. Then do yourself a favor and go see an Alan Ayckbourn play.

Afterward you’ll have a sense of what this play is, what it wishes it could be, and what you had hoped it would be.

All that said, I confess to laughing even at the most hackneyed of lines especially if delivered by Christopher Berry as the husband Paul. Berry understands that this is farce lite, but he never gives into the temptation to play it big or with anything other than understated neuroticism.

His cast members – Polly Lee as his funny-dumb wife and Doug Meswarb as the funny-ha-ha dentist – skip about gamely in these goofy roles. They, too, are silly without being sloppy, but sometimes go for a cartoonish approach that can wear thin.

Stack’s set is straightforward hotel-room fare, and Cheryl A. Robitaille’s costumes are appropriately unremarkable – especially in the case of Lee, whose bland outfits, sad to say, could have benefited from murder.

Five minutes after you leave the show, you may forget you’ve ever seen it. Don’t plan on a whole lot of conversation on the car ride home. Oddly enough, that’s the correct response. This is theater in the summer, after all; you want an escape from the year’s loftier pursuits. For most people, it’s OK in the mayhem month of July if the punch line is: “I’m more than a woman; I’m a movement.” Or “I’m a dentist. I can have any woman I want.”

You may tire of the set-ups very early on in this play, but the physical gags and energetic performances surprisingly carry the two hours. Regular TV watchers will feel right at home. Just as with prime time, there is a cheery moral flapping away in the midst of all the banter about who gets the girl and who gets to die. Although you may think the lesson is love conquers all, it’s really more about the quirky lines that connect and divide us as people in relationships.

“Murder at the Howard Johnson’s” will be performed 8:15 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday through July 14 and 2 p.m. July 15 at Acadia Repertory Theatre in Somesville. For information, call 244-7260.