Theater Review—

Westport Shows Us How Much Fun It Can Be To Go

‘Around the World in Eighty Days’

By Julie Stern

WESTPORT — Westport Country Playhouse has opened its 2009 season with a production billed to appeal to all ages. Bring your whole family.

Playwright Mark Brown has taken Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days and turned the novel into a vehicle for inventive stagecraft, with myriad sound effects and lots of characters pretending to be swaying on elephants, bouncing up and down on a runaway train, or leaning against the wind in a Pacific typhoon.

Using a variety of costumes, assorted accents, and copious amounts of false body hair, a quintet of actors perform some thirty-odd roles as the imperturbable Phileas Fogg and his spirited French servant Passepartout make their way from London to Marseilles, Suez, Benares, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco, New York and Liverpool.

A man of supremely regular habits (who has dismissed his previous valet for bringing him shaving water two degrees cooler than ordered) who has no profession, and who spends every day at his club, reading the newspaper and playing whist, Fogg makes a spur of the moment wager that it is possible to travel completely around the world in eighty days. He is ready to stake his entire fortune on it.

Having made the bet, he announces that he will leave that same evening, stopping home only to collect his new valet and a carpetbag with socks and shirts for both of them, before catching the night train to Liverpool, which will allow them to catch the steamer to Suez.

What Fogg does not know is that he is being trailed by the relentless (and relentlessly stupid) Detective Fix, who is convinced that his quarry is the mysterious gentleman bandit who has recently robbed the Bank of England of a huge amount of money. Fix tries to use Passepartout to gain information about his employer.

He is waiting for London to send him a warrant so that he can arrest Fogg, but in the meantime he tries to have him detained, at various points along the itinerary. The wily Passepartout becomes suspicious, and manages to confound the knavish policeman.

Fogg’s plan depends on making perfect connections at every juncture. However, a variety of mishaps — incomplete rail lines, attacks by Indians, the need to rescue a damsel in distress being forced to commit suttee on the funeral pyre of her aged husband — require the traveler to improvise: hire an elephant;  an ice boat;  buy a ship…

As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “and so it goes…” For two hours, they ride on trains, catch boats, catch trains, catch boats, always sparring with the foolish Fix. It gets a bit long, as if this trip is taking place in real time. There isn’t much dramatic development, save that the beautiful young Indian widow saved from Suttee is clearly in love with her rescuer. He doesn’t seem to notice.

Evan Zes is most entertaining as the acrobatic Passepartout. Mark Shanahan is resolute as the phlegmatic Phileas. Jeff Biehl plays many roles, chief among them Detective Fix (I liked him a lot more  Long Wharf’s production of Donald Margulies’ Shipwrecked, probably because that is a better and more dynamic play).

Andrew Grusetskie plays the largest number of parts including an interesting turn as a swaggering American colonel who seemed a cross between George Custer and Buffalo Bill. Lauren Elise McCord  alternates between being Aouda, the beautiful heroine, and three other characters, all male.

There were many children in the audience and they all seemed well behaved, so I guess they liked it, and the people who brought them seemed satisfied that it was worth the trip. The company put a lot of effort into the bits and pieces, which won them plenty of laughs. In fact it sounded like a TV laugh track.

When all is said and done, if you want to bring your kids, or your grandchildren, go ahead. As for going on your own? It’s kind of like Disney World. There are people who do it without benefit of children, but you just wonder why.

(Performances continue until May 9.)