Graveyard shift

A seasoned cast rises above tired material

by Steve Vineburg

THE CEMETERY CLUB

By Ivan Menchell. Directed by Jack Neary. Sets and lighting by Michael and Julia Gray. Costumes by Trish Mandella. With Sheila Ferrini, Ellen Colton, Bobbie Steinbach, Paul Wildman, and Cheryl McMahon. At Worcester Foothills, through January 28.

The opening scenes of The Cemetery Club, the first Foothills production of the new year, are buoyant and funny. The humor in Ivan Menchell's play about three Jewish widows in

Queens, best of friends whose lives revolve around monthly visits to their husbands' graves, is standard Borscht belt -- you'd be unlikely to confuse it with wit. (Sample: one of them cracks a pun on "séance" and "seder.") But comedy doesn't have to be sophisticated to get to you, and the antics of flamboyant Lucille (Ellen Colton) and deadpan Doris (Bobbie Steinbach) -- to whom sincere Ida (Sheila Ferrini) plays devoted straight woman - are lively and entertaining after the manner of a wacky, well-timed, off-the-cuff-feeling TV sitcom (I was constantly reminded of Bette and of the half-hour fifties comedies it emulates, such as The Jack Benny Show and Burns and Allen).

Only a novice theatergoer would fail to expect the sentimentality on the other end of the jokes, but Menchell makes you pay too much for your good time. Not content with wringing a few tears out of his audience, he squeezes and squeezes. After a couple of years of tending her beloved husband's grave, Ida quietly decides that it's time to return to life and responds to the advances of a sweetly fumbling butcher (Paul Wildman), a widower who's crossed paths with her at the cemetery. But Sam's courtship of Ida constitutes a threat to her two pals - Doris, who's still too devastated by her loss to step out from the shadows and contemplate a new life without her husband, and Lucille, who envies Ida's new relationship. So the two women steer Sam the butcher away from their friend, and the dramatic consequences are dire indeed: a couple of melodramatic confrontation scenes, revelations about Lucille that signal their approach with the subtlety of a herd of stampeding elephants, and two weeping, hair-tearing scenes for Ellen Colton that no actress should be obliged to play.

It's particularly distressing to watch Colton forced to chew the graveside ivy after her banter with Bobbie Steinbach has afforded so much pleasure. These two are an inspired comic match. Colton has a broad clown's face - a Bette Midler face - that keeps breaking into expressive pieces and coming magically back together again, and it plays off Steinbach's long, ferocious deadpan. Their voices seem to carom off each other, too: Colton's is bubbly and slides around like a plate of jello with nuggets of fruit glistening in it, while Steinbach sounds as if she were talking through a rusty pipe. These two comics are so hilarious together that you might feel sorry for Sheila Ferrini, stuck with the straight part, though she's convincing in every detail. But the director, Jack Neary, orchestrates the lighthearted scenes among the trio so that Ferrini gets to join in on the fun whenever possible. I loved the second-act opening, where, returning from a drunken evening at a friend's latest wedding, they land in Ida's apartment like leaky boats washing improbably and uproariously up on shore. Whatever my objections to Menchell's play, I was happy for the chance to watch these pros in action - and in joyous sync.

Cheryl McMahon, a Foothills regular, has a one-scene role as another widow who makes an over-the-top effort at snagging Sam, but she doesn't seem cast right. Her style of mugging feels misplaced here, and though I've found her winning in other ethnic roles, she didn't convince me that her Mildred was Jewish. But Paul Wildman, with his mashed-in face and eyelids like upside-down teacups, keeps up his end of the comic bargain, and he manages his one-step-forward, two-steps-back wooing scenes with Ferrini's Ida with such affable delicacy that he turns out to be the one actor on stage who can play Menchell's drop-dead melodramatic scenes and get away with it. Steinbach comes close to carrying off her serious scenes, too, because she's such a splendid performer. The problem is that you don't want to see this woman set her jaw and play big emotions when she's so damn funny the rest of the time. In one scene, she sashays down a staircase, shifting her square bulk from side to side while pointing her index fingers as if she were executing some World War Two-era dance step. At this moment, which feels improvised, she might be a comic-strip character come to hilarious life. The problem I had with The Cemetery Club was that every time it turned on the faucet and the comedy went into remission, I felt a kind of sensory deprivation.