Review: Rhyme Gone Wild in ‘The Metromaniacs’

NEW YORK — Not many playwrights would rhyme “Brittany” and “kitteny,” but then not many have cause.

David Ives does, and in “The Metromaniacs,” which opened in a handsome Red Bull production at the Duke on 42nd Street on Sunday, he scours the far recesses of English for its most amusing specimens. In his word-drunk universe, “news” hooks up with “chartreuse,” “strophes” wins “trophies” and “rival” gets “adjectival.”

If those pairs — let alone the possibly illegal conjugation of “comedy” and “Melpomene” — sound a bit classical and even foreign, there’s a reason. “The Metromaniacs” is the third of Ives’ translations of French comedies from the 17th and 18th centuries, all originally directed by Michael Kahn of the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington. Actually, Ives calls them “translaptations”: translations that are also adaptations, and rather aggressive ones at that.

I’ll take Ives’ word (as he writes in an introduction to the script) that “The Metromaniacs” is based on “an obscure play from 1738 called ‘La Métromanie.'” The title refers to a poetry craze then sweeping Paris — a craze focused on the work of a Breton poet named Malcrais de La Vigne. But de La Vigne was neither a woman nor from Brittany. She was a man living in Paris.

On this slender thread, the original playwright, Alexis Piron, hung a farce à clef so complicated it apparently spun in circles. But what Ives calls its “Champagne” poetry left him hoping to re-create the spell of its language, with only enough plot to keep it aloft.

And so we get a play that squeezes contemporary English into pentameter couplets — and a story that, while still too complex to summarize, doesn’t matter. Even after seeing and reading it, I can’t say I am sure what happens, except that it involves the gender-switching poet character, here called Francalou (rhymes with “rankle you”), and his verse-besotted daughter, her soubrette of a maid, two dashing suitors, a randy servant and a blustery uncle. They all meet in Francalou’s Paris ballroom, where he is staging his own play about the very same septet.

This Versailles-like mirroring of plot within plot is deftly engineered; from his earliest plays (three of which were collected as “All in the Timing” in 2013), Ives has been a master craftsman of comic structure. And his previous French translaptations — “The Liar,” seen last year in New York, and “The Heir Apparent,” seen in 2014, both at Classic Stage Company — demonstrated his play-doctor’s acumen for diagnosing and repairing faulty dramatic logic. Not for nothing did he spend 18 years writing the concert abridgments for 33 Encores! musicals.

But in “The Metromaniacs,” which Kahn stages with a nice, light touch, Ives may finally have come up against a problem he couldn’t solve: wit far in excess of the material it’s meant to enhance. Unlike “The Heir Apparent” and “The Liar,” which have strong themes and stick to them, “The Metromaniacs” is about little but its own workings.

That puts immense pressure on the poetry — a word Ives pairs with “grow a tree.” And in a play that runs to nearly two hours, it’s amazing how little his invention flags. I refer not just to those endless pinwheeling rhymes but also to the puns and airy notions that make them spin. One spurned swain moans: “I swear, disdain’s my curse!/My girl, who is a poem, is averse!” Poetry, the soubrette declares, is “an inflammation of the mental bursa/Where verse becomes your vice — and vice-a-versa.”

These tickle the ear, a lovely sensation. But being tickled on precisely the same patch of skin in exactly the same rhythm — five beats to the line for 2,000 lines — is eventually deadening. And since all the characters speak in essentially the same form, there is no variation or, indeed, verbal distinctiveness. That leaves the cast, which is uniformly good, to build characters on top of the verse, instead of within it where characterization belongs. The result is rickety.

Only in the second act, with the onerous exposition out of the way, do the couplets begin to give birth to satisfying story. Finally Ives lets one of the suitors, a playwright manqué, have a full-out soliloquy, imagining the staging of his own first comedy. (It’s beautifully performed by Christian Conn.) Interestingly, the other moment that springs to life is also about the theater. In a brief epilogue, Francalou (Adam LeFevre) steps out of frame and out of time to reveal the final twist.

“Life’s a multistranded plot,” he declaims, “so intricate who knows who tied each knot!”

“Champagne” it may be. But a little of it goes a long way on an empty ... rhymes with hummock.

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‘The Metromaniacs’

Through May 26 at the Duke on 42nd Street, Manhattan; 646-223-3010, dukeon42.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

By David Ives; directed by Michael Kahn; sets by James Noone; costumes by Murell Horton; lighting by Betsy Adams; sound by Matt Stine; wigs by Dori Beau Seigneur; production stage manager, Kristin M. Herrick; composer, Adam Wernick; props by Eric Reynolds; production manager, Gary Levinson; general manager, Sherri Kotimsky. Presented by Red Bull Theater, Jesse Berger, founder and artistic director; Jim Bredeson, managing director.

Cast: Christian Conn (Damis), Amelia Pedlow (Lucille), Noah Averbach-Katz (Dorante), Dina Thomas (Lisette), Adam Green (Mondor), Adam LeFevre (Francalou) and Peter Kybart (Baliveau).