From Russia with Malice

ANTON CHEKHOV FAMOUSLY insisted his plays were comedies, but what would he make of the broad, burlesque style of Michael Frayn’s The Sneeze, a theatrical omnibus of eight Chekhov stories? Currently being revived by the Pearl Theatre Company, The Sneeze is hardly the melancholy-tinged comedy that we’ve come to know and love in The Seagull or The Cherry Orchard.

In fact, The Sneeze is exactly the kind of loud, aggressive comedy that marks Neil Simon’s farces as outdated (Simon himself dabbled in adapting Chekhov with his The Good Doctor). For almost three painful hours, the Pearl’s acting company poses and preens on stage, striking attitudes that telegraph well in advance the impending punchlines.

Of Frayn’s eight vignettes, the ones that fare best in the ham-fisted hands of director J.R. Sullivan and the cast are the shortest. “The Inspector-General,” one of the few entries in the evening that doesn’t rely on physical comedy, is a brief, amusing duet between an indiscreet cart driver (Dominic Cuskern), who inadvertently reveals too much about the community’s vast knowledge of the Inspector-General’s personal life and habits, and his passenger (Bradford Cover), who turns out to be the same Inspector-General. The evening’s opener, “Drama,” seems dull and annoying until viewed in retrospect, after being thrown into relief by the rest of the show. A determined young playwright (Rachel Botchan) corners a writer (Chris Mixon, who reveals over and over again that he fancies himself a Chaplinesque master of slapstick comedy) and reads aloud from her stultifying new play. Were “Drama” a meta-commentary about what awaits audiences in The Sneeze, it would be due more credit. But with an abrupt stabbing that comes from nowhere for a climax, it’s a throwaway.

Mixon does manage to convey some genuine emotion in the second act’s first vignette, “The Evils of Tobacco,” a Robert Benchley-esque monologue that finds a henpecked husband asserting himself during a lecture. After some lugubrious physical comedy, of course. But any other time Sullivan and cast try for pathos (notably in the excruciating “Swan Song,” which finds Robert Hock playing an elderly, drunken actor in such a tedious monologue that I entertained myself by counting how many audience members had fallen asleep), the results fall flat. And any time the cast aims for zany farce, the results fall flat. The titular short play, in which a sneeze at the opera has possibly fatal consequences, is amusing until the silent-film-style mugging becomes obnoxious. And in the final scene, “The Proposal,” which finds two neighbors (Mixon and Botchan again) unable to become affianced because they keep quarreling over ridiculous subjects, the actors (including Dominic Cuskern as a cheerfully suicidal father) are so relentlessly loud and monotonous that the one-joke scene trails off into self-amused irrelevancy; no one enjoys the cast’s performances more than the cast.

Designer Jo Winiarski’s set, however, is everything the show is not: colorful, elegant and stylish. For a show titled after something that can be so short and sweet, The Sneeze is an over-extended yawn.

>> THE SNEEZE Through Oct. 31, New York City Center Stage II, 131 W. 55th St (betw. 6th & 7th Aves.), 212-581-1212; $45-$55.