Jolly Bedlam

By T. E. K.

WILD OATS by John O'Keeffe

This diverting farce comedy was first performed at London's Covent Garden in 1791 and reached New York briefly in 1793. It was virtually a lost play when the Royal Shakespeare Company dusted it off for what turned out to be a hit run during the 1976-77 season. Now Wild Oats has crossed the seas again, thanks to the enterprising zeal of off-Broadway's CSC (Classic Stage Company) Repertory.

John O'Keeffe, who wrote the play, was born in Dublin in 1747 but achieved success in London as the astonishingly prolific author of more than 60 plays and light operas. From the outset of O'Keeffe's career, dramatic historians seem to have regarded him as a jigging shadow of his comic betters, but Sheridan held him in esteem, and the renowned drama critic William Hazlitt went so far as to call him "our English Moliere."

From our vantage point he seems more like an English Feydeau. Without the bedrooms to be sure, but with bedlam aplenty. The identity crisis that most of the characters in Wild Oats suffer is being mistaken for someone else. Fortunately the audience, kept posted by O'Keeffe's pungent asides, is always in the know.

The central character, Jack Rover (Patrick Egan), is a vagabond actor with a habit of dropping Shakespearean tag lines into his own speeches at malapropriate moments. While posing as an aristocrat, he meets Maria Amaranth (Barbara Blackledge), a lady of high birth, and is smitten with her as is she with him. No bounder, he flees the scene of incipient bliss rather than reveal his lack of social pedigree. Lady Amaranth pursues him into a thicket of revelations. Brother discovers brother, impostor unmasks impostor, long separated husbands and wives are reunited with their offspring. At play's end the happiness is unending. What the members of the cast lack in polish they more than make up for in zest, and with infectious humanity they sow a sweet garden of delight. -- T. E. K.

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