The play is set in two London flats, but it's all the same (unlike Alan Ayckbourn's more complicated setting for "How the Other Half Loves"), and whichever one you're in depends on which front door you use.
Meese and her splendid cast of zanies toss subtlety to the winds, which really is the only way to interpret this in-one-door-and-out-the-other piece. And the over-the-top performances by a few actors actually balance the straight comedy quite comfortably.
In the center of this madcap maelstrom is Cort Huckabone as the duplicitous schlub of a cabbie, aptly named "John Smith," who's wed to two delectable ladies (Natalie Beisner and Wendy Braun). It's his perpetual plotting that stirs the farcical mixture, and it's up to the rest of the cast to keep up with him.
Beisner fares the most favorably here, railing vehemently against Huckabone's strange behavior and screamingly losing it on occasion. The show puts her figure to maximum use, peeling her down to her scanties not just once, but twice.
There's a master thief on the loose, the show-stealing Mitch Nunn, who plays Huckabone's and Beisner's upstairs neighbor and who's enlisted in the cabbie's secret as a device to let the audience in on the plot. The veteran Nunn is terrific as he takes on a variety of fictional characterizations to support his buddy, all with some splendid facial reactions.
Braun neatly enacts the second wife, a willowy and sexually dissatisfied spouse who keeps finding herself locked in one room or another. She's particularly effective when mistaken for a drag queen in one of the more absurd plot twists.
