The Daily Californian Online

Thomas Thornton Wilder's "The Matchmaker" promises hilarity wrought of schemes gone awry and mistaken identities. Unfortunately, much of the comedy is buried under rough performances in the Actors Ensemble of Berkeley's earnest staging, which opened last Friday at Live Oak Theatre.

Set in 19th-century New York, the hub of Wilder's farce is Horace Vandergelder, a wealthy merchant and incorrigible curmudgeon hell bent on preventing his niece from marrying a good-for-nothing artist while negotiating his own second marriage. Enter Dolly Levi, a professional machinator who agrees to help Vandergelder find a wife but ends up with her hand in everyone's business, stirring trouble left and right.

Although the premise of "The Matchmaker" is rife with comedic opportunities, the opening performance got off to a shaky start from which it never fully recovered. The burst of a Viennanese waltz signaled the beginning of the show-a nod to the play's source material, a 19th-century Viennanese farce. But when the curtain was drawn, the first few lines of dialogue and, more importantly, the first punch line were completely submerged in the near-deafening waltz.

For the rest of the play, most of the cast had some difficulty delivering their lines with the swiftness they required. When it comes to comedy driven by spitfire dialogue, timing is absolutely essential-an errant pause is all you need to kill the momentum and knock the punch right out of the punch line. Buses would have fit through some of the pauses between the dialgoue.

Apart from struggling with delivery, director Matthew Travisiano's production was further injured by mistranslated portrayals. Though the dialogue would have you believe Vandergelder-surreptitiously referred to as "Wolf Trap" by his timid apprentices-to be a brooding tyrant, Louis Schilling cast him as more of an overbearingly cranky old man given to alternate fits of whining and screaming. Schilling never seemed to fully settle into his character, resulting in an overacted performance.

Due to these difficulties, it was hard to find most of the characters believable, even as the paper thin caricatures they seemed intended to be, which had the ultimate and most damaging effect of distancing the audience from the narrative. Because the characters weren't believable, the absurd situations that they found themselves in were merely ludicrous rather than laughable.

The production's saving grace was the incomparably polished Maureen Coyne who outshone the entire cast as the devilishly wiley Dolly Levi. Dolly makes it clear early in the play that she mostly likes to meddle for sport-it amuses her to mess with other people's lives. Coyne plays this schemer with the pitch perfect lightheartedness of someone absolutely tickled by the trouble they've managed to brew.

Also of note was Martha Leuhrmann as the practically-deaf Gertrude and later as a German cook. Despite her bit parts, Luehrmann was fully immersed in her roles, making her a charmingly funny treat to watch. Kevin Watkins as the mysterious Malachi Stacks also deserves mention. With his devious Cheshire cat grin, Watkins' character was a wild card at first, appearing briefly in the opening act and not returning until after the intermission where his well-played inebriation helped to lubricate the unraveling situations and also made for a highly enjoyable drunken monologue.

Unfortunately, a few noteworthy performances weren't enough to rescue "The Matchmaker" from its amateurish fumbles. Coyne was largely undermined by the mediocrity that surrounded her-a fact that wasn't helped by a truly heinous costuming choice after the intermission which was a serious distraction. Despite their obvious sincerity, the Actors Ensemble of Berkeley and Thornton's play were sorely mismatched.