Comedy Geometry

Nurse Jane Goes to Hawaii

Written by Allan Straton

Directed by Mark Prascak

At Adams tonight and tomorrow

SITTING DOWN in our seats we noticed that there is only one door out of this room. With no intermission, this really was a case of No Exit.

Allusion aside, it must be noted that Nurse Jane Goes to Hawaii bears absolutely no resemblance to Sartre's dark existential classic about overcrowding. What we really have here is a better-than-average sex farce about a geology teacher (Tom Hughes) who brings home a Harlequin romance hack named Vivien Bliss (Lynda Cohen) for a weekend tryst.

This set-up is much to the chagrin of his wife Doris (Sally Kish), a babbling advice columnist who has cancelled her travel plans so she can get some last-minute coverage by a shrewish reporter (Jen Harris). Of course, as in all good farces, it turns out that she and everyone else in the play, including an acne-afflicted dermatologist (Andrew Osborne) and an abandoned son bearing gifts (Chris Reed), are secretly related.

With the exception of Devo, funny-talking people with boxes on their heads are pretty hard to watch. Here we have another exception.

Somewhere director Mark Prascak was hit with the stroke of genius of giving each of the two-dimensional characters a different color, shape, physical tic, and annoying vocal mannerism. Best of all, these accoutrements match their role in the play. It's not really cubist, but it is very funny.

The cast really deserves a hand for pulling off a difficult feat with grace. Particularly noteworthy is Leah Nutting as the tyrannical bridge-playing editor Betty Scant. Any writer who has ever suffered under the tyrannical hand of a tasteless editor will marvel at the verisimilitude she brings to her tirades, considering that she has a red polygon perched on her noggin. If only all our editors were so well dressed.