Are drunk people funny?
“I don’t think so,” Kelli O’Hara said, pointing out that she last appeared on Broadway in “Days of Wine and Roses,” a musical about the terrible damage done by people who drink to excess.
Yet she and Rose Byrne are currently delivering one of the funniest drunk scenes (and follow-up hangovers) in recent stage history.
The women star in “Fallen Angels,” a 1925 Noël Coward play in which two wives get tipsy and then full-out snockered as they await the arrival of a Frenchman they each had an affair with years earlier. In the Roundabout Theater Company’s revival, which will stream on June 5 on Broadway HD, the two Tony-nominated stars stagger about, get twisted in a phone cord and fall over furniture.
Still, O’Hara explained, the pratfalls are not in themselves the source of the comedy. “What’s funny,” she said, is “the loosening”: the unwinding of control and dignity among people who value both highly. Here are some of the ways she and Byrne — under the direction of Scott Ellis, and with the help of costumes, sets, sound, wigs and props — achieve that.
Just a Tiny Drop
Coward doesn’t specify how much the women drink or how soon they get drunk, but Byrne said, “We tracked it.”
In Act 2, after their husbands have left for a golf weekend, Julia (O’Hara) and Jane (Byrne) fill the time as they await the arrival of their mutual Frenchman by sipping Champagne in oversize coupes. Soon, having chugged a whole bottle, they start on a second. There are also martinis, straight up with a twist, and a sizable aperitif of Medoc. “And we’re barely eating,” O’Hara added: just one oyster each by the first cork pop. (The oyster is actually yellow Jell-O.)
Drinking is a playwright’s best friend, a dramaturgical accelerant. Where would “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” be if its treacherous foursome were teetotalers? Still, every actor must decide whether the alcohol is meant to help a character suppress feelings or let them out. “Even in a farce,” O’Hara said, “what are the stakes?”
