Gammer Gurton's Needle

They're not really sure if Gammer Gurton's Needle is a bawdy Elizabethan farce like the posters say. It's date of composition (c. 1555) by an unknown Mr. S, Master of Art at Cambridge might make it Edwardian. And its bawdiness never makes it out of the anal stage and into the genital, which really means it's not bawdy.

But in Steve Kaplan's Loeb production, Gammer Gurton's Needle is a funny play, though what play it is that's funny is often unclear. Kaplan has staged a brilliantly colorful, broadly comic, visually and musically inventive production which attaches itself only loosely to what in a modernized version, is still a crude and dull play.

The problem lies in the text and in Kaplan's handling of it. The play comes from a tradition of academic farce in an era when the celibate Fellows of English universities had to blow off steam some way. It is more "important" as a source of Elizabethan comedy than worthwhile in itself. To play it completely straight would be the kiss of death.

Kaplan has played it completely crooked, milking laughs from every possible source--Charles Schulz, Ballantine beer signs, karate and sumo, and cute animals (it really is a charming cat)--except the text. The lines are raced through in a variety of singsongs. This, combined with the broad accents of the actors and the twisted rhymes of the text, make them nearly unintelligible. The production's only continuity lies in running gags.

The plot, as much as one cares, is about the strange disappearance of Dame Gurton's sewing needle (Raye Bush is Gammer, not the needle). We eventually find it in the britches of her man Hodge (Dan Chumley), an acrobatic archetypal simpleton, but not until Diccon the Bedlam (Dan Deitch) has thrown everyone at each other's throats and chickens.