Farce Person Singular

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The central device in Alan Ayckbourn's Communicating Doors is a portal between hotel suites that carries women who step through it either 20 years forward or 20 years back in time. This idea may seem offbeat even for a farce, but it is not surprising from a man whose nearly 50 other plays involve such tricks as a robot spouse used in a child-custody battle; audience choices that provide a script with 16 endings; and a three-story house seen on one level (with actors tiptoeing up and down -- that is, back and forth -- along imaginary stairs). "Games are fun," Ayckbourn says, his doughy face suddenly aquiver with adolescent glee. "I hope someday to write a play set in an airport, with actual moving sidewalks and escalators and revolving baggage carousels. I just don't have an idea for what happens there yet."

Perhaps best known for Absurd Person Singular, Ayckbourn is one of the world's most widely produced playwrights (translated into 32 languages) and surely among the most inventive. Over the years he has found plausible plot uses for everything from a Dungeons & Dragons-style game to London's Waterloo Bridge and has evoked laughs from such unlikely topics as a violent bank robbery and a young beauty's attempts to kill herself with the everyday tools and appliances of her suburban kitchen. Ayckbourn's originality, wit, poignancy and unfailing empathy for middle-class values have made him the dominant commercial voice in British theater. Belatedly, he is winning a significant following in America.

This month alone, the U.S. premiere of Communicating Doors was the centerpiece of Chicago's International Theatre Festival, while his two-part Revengers' Comedies has been enjoying a stronger production at Washington's Arena Stage than it had in London under his own direction -- in part because Arena is in the round, like the theater Ayckbourn runs in the Yorkshire city of Scarborough. In recent years troupes in Houston, Seattle and Cleveland, Ohio, have offered major Ayckbourn productions, and in 1991 two of his shows reached Broadway in the same season.

For Ayckbourn, the fleeting Chicago visit had special sentimental appeal because it involved his Scarborough troupe in their second U.S. appearance ever and first since 1981. For his fans, Communicating Doors marks an end to a period when his works grew darker and darker, to the point that they could scarcely be called comedies. "This is intentionally lighter," Ayckbourn says of his souffle of time travel, murder, melodrama and bedroom farce. "It's also meant to be affirmative after things have grown steadily worse in Britain under governments that seem not to care."

The central character starts as a prostitute. Through her own hard-won self- respect, the compassion of others and the reverberating links between past and future, she is abruptly transformed in the final moments into an educated wife and mother. This evolution is a metaphor for what Ayckbourn believes many of Britain's neglected downtrodden could achieve. But he won't let the audience off the hook with an uncomplicatedly happy ending. The flashing lights outside, seemingly signs of a festival or movie premiere, are at last revealed to be the flares of an ongoing civil war pitting London's inner suburbs against one another. Just as the farce is bringing reassuring order to its microcosmic world, the play's brilliant final five minutes kick away all assumptions of order in the larger world. It's vintage Ayckbourn: a puzzle, laughter and an aftershock.