Absurd Person Singular

The Central Square Theater launches its 2013-14 season with the Nora Theatre Company's fast-moving production of Alan Ayckbourn's 1972 farce "Absurd Person Singular" through Aug. 18.

The prolific Ayckbourn has written nearly 80 plays in a career that's spanned more than half a century. With "Absurd Person Singular," the playwright throws himself full throttle into a myriad of satirical swipes at marriage, middle-class artifice, status-seeking, social-climbing and the human capacity for general self-involvement.

Each of the play's three acts takes place in someone's kitchen. The three settings take place on three successive Christmas Eves, a prime date, given the season's combination of forced conviviality and copious alcoholic consumption, for a collision of social niceties with underlying contempt, ambition and despair. As it happens, the same three couples keep careening into one another's paths, invariably to outrageous effect.

In Act One, it's Sidney (David Berger-Jones) and Jane (Samantha Evans) who host the party. Jane's obsessive cleaning has gotten her wound up to a state of high agitation, and the weather (social as well as meteorological) hasn't helped her mood; one door leads from her kitchen to the back yard, soaked by an ongoing downpour, and the other door leads to the equally dampening prospect of the living room, taken over by boorish acquaintances, among them Marion (Stephanie Clayman) and Ronald (Steve Barkhimer).

Marion can scarcely conceal her disapproval for the shabby state of Jane and Sidney's home; Ronald, meantime, is of great interest to Sidney, because he's the banker who can open the door to Sidney's future in the residential development industry. Another married couple, Eva (Liz Hayes) and Geoffrey (Bill Mootos) round out the fun, with Eva gulping her anti-psychotic meds and Geoffrey revealing his horndog credentials in a locker room conversation that would send Jane scurrying for her cleaning products, were she there to hear it. (She's not: A situation with the supply of tonic water has sent her into a tizzy, complete with an impromptu disguise and an acutely embarrassed retreat into the back yard with its icy downpour.)

Act Two jumps forward one year, to Geoffrey and Eva's kitchen: Eva, in the throes of a breakdown that's been triggered by Geoffrey's ongoing affair with another woman, is scribbling draft after draft of her suicide note even as her husband drones on about fresh starts and what to serve their guests.

As the others trickle in and find their way to the kitchen, they each mistake Eva's suicide attempts for household chores gone awry. (Meantime, the kitchen is similarly bracketed by perils: Impending snow out the window; a huge, snarling, and possibly rabid dog in the sitting room.) The resulting tableau is one of such untoward disarray (to the tune of "The Twelve Days of Christmas") that the play hits an apex there and then.

By contrast, the third act, which takes place in Ronald and Marion's kitchen, is tepid --�despite the freezing cold, which has pervaded the house thanks to a breakdown of the heating system. (It's also a handy metaphor for the frosty relations between Ronald and his wife, whose descent into alcoholism has progressed alarmingly in the past year.) Eva has transformed from suicidal basket case to angel of mercy, paying a visit to the discombobulated Marion; Geoffrey's philandering passion, meantime, seem to have cooled down a bit.

For the first time, there seems to be a current of actual normalcy in the room. Surely, it cant last, and indeed, it's not a snarling dog nor a host of unwelcome revelers in the next room that pins them down, but Sidney and Jane, whose clueless, abrasive intrusiveness has come to full flower. The British have a real flair for depicting nightmare scenarios from which there is no possible escape: For George Orwell, it was a boot grinding into a human face for all time.

For Alan Ayckbourn, it's a nitwit in a tux rising above his peers to shout down orders that defy sense and defile dignity. The so-very-British thing about it is how, rather than be rude, his victims dance and stagger at his feet.

The cast embraces its parts with gusto, and Daniel Gidron's direction keeps things crackling along. Leslie Held's costuming is colorful and smart, the wardrobes commenting as much on the times (the '60s aren't quite over in this vision of England in 1972) as on the people who wear them. Dewey Dellay has some real fun with the sound design (he makes the rain outside Jane's kitchen a vital part of the setting, and provides just the right howl from Geoffrey and Ava's humongous dog at just the right moment).

But the technical showpiece of this production are Brynna Bloomfield's three sets, which are changed over during the two intermissions. It's an involved and fascinating process that makes it worth staying in your seat to observe.