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2008-09 Season

March 2008

Feydeau-Si-Deau (Chemin de Fer)

by Georges Feydeau

directed by Jeremy Wechsler

The Chicago debut of Georges Feydeau's sexiest and most groundbreaking farce – only 104 years late! An inspired lunacy that Time Magazine extolled as raising the sex farce to the level of "dramatic genius." Chanal's wife Francine is the sweetest, most faithful spouse imaginable.

Well, the sweetest anyway.

In her search for excitement she gets her lover's clothes thrown through windows, incites a duel, cures stuttering and turns marriages upside down. It was one of Theater Wit's most madcap efforts and starred some of Chicago's best comic performers.

In this breathless adultery fest, French turn-of-the-century playwright Georges Feydeau proves he's the Bach of the bedroom farce. When two stultifyingly bourgeois Parisian couples unwittingly trade partners, they become ensnared in a web of deception, mistaken identities, police inquiries, and random gunfire. Feydeau's clowns dance impishly on a precipice of moral ruin.... The production ultimately delivers satisfying mayhem. Chicago Reader
Jeremy Wechsler's astute staging for Theater Wit keeps the action in the late-19th Century, upper-middle-class Parisian world, and the set by Hang Le and Courtney O'Neill has the requisite doors for breathless slam-bang entrances and exits. Kevin Theis's swaggering arrogance and eventual humiliation as Fedot bring a certain disgraced New York governor to mind, and there are sterling turns by several supporting players.Chicago Tribune