`Reverse Psychology' full of wicked merriment

Theater review

"Reverse Psychology" by Charles Ludlam. Directed by Shawn Belyea. Wednesday-Sunday through Dec. 16 at Empty Space Theatre, 3509 Fremont Ave. N., Seattle. $20-$28. 206-547-7500.

The somersault is a tip-off.

One minute, Shelley Reynolds, playing the lusty, adulterous Eleanor, is making out furiously with Phillip Endicott's Leonard, a married psychiatrist. The next, she's losing her footing and tumbling across the bed like a frowzy gymnast.

"Reverse Psychology" is a play that needs such acrobatics, and director Shawn Belyea has not stinted on them.

In his impressively physical staging of the 20-year-old Charles Ludlam play, which opens the new Empty Space Theatre season, Belyea keeps his four-member cast in constant motion: painting, fainting, diving into a pretend swimming pool, ripping off their clothes and mugging up a frenzy.

On other occasions, this might be provocation for a citizen's arrest on the grounds of exceeding the shtick limit. But "Reverse Psychology," which is both minor Ludlam and a vivid example of his theatrical lunacy, largely profits from these shenanigans.

Especially when the perpetrators are two other up-from-the-fringe farceurs buzzing on the late Ludlam's camp-satiric frequency.

One is Imogen Love, perfectly cast as Leonard's haughty spouse Karen, another amorous shrink. The lanky Ms. Love has the facial profile of a sleek hawk and long legs that should be registered lethal weapons. She maintains her absurd dignity here through all manner of surreal nonsense, including the priceless moment when she strips to the nude, whips on a pair of goggles, and jumps into that pool on a rescue mission.

Kevin Mesher is at least her equal in lankiness and agile mayhem. Playing Freddie, Eleanor's philandering hubby and Karen's lover, Mesher lets it rip as a painter whose flamboyant neuroses far exceed his artistic talent.

If Dick Van Dyke and Paul Lynde had a son (and in Ludlam's topsy-turvy universe, they might have), he'd be the pratfalling, peroxided, fabulously mercurial Mesher. He can morph from sniveling crybaby to arrogant poseur in a twinkle, and whisk a hearty laugh from a toss-away martini joke.

Playing the fool to the hilt without ever admitting one's foolishness is an essential attribute in Ludlam's tilt-a-whirl universe. Among many comedies Ludlam wrote for his Ridiculous Theatrical Company, this is actually one of the most conventionally structured.

An archetypal sex farce, "Reverse Psychology" concerns a pair of shrinks who get sexually entangled with the spouses of one another's clients. They don't realize their mistake until both couples collide at a coastside hotel. And how do they sort out their affairs? By gulping down a psycho-active drug that messes with everyone's libido.

That screwball nod to psychedelics is vintage Ludlam, as are the plot points gleefully lifted from Noel Coward's "Private Lives" and Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and the many ostentatiously bad puns, homoerotic double-entendres and one-line groaners dotting the text.

There also are fresher jests and stockpiled cliches about kinky sex, modern art and therapist-patient relations, wrapped in a Ludlam-ian gauze of gender anxiety and "interpersonal disorientation."

So is it funny? Off and on, hilariously so, thanks to Belyea's rapid-fire pacing, John Patterson's well-employed set of sliding screens, Nathan Anderson's Hawaiian guitar-on-acid music, and the expert lunacy of Mesher and Love.

Reynolds, as a sort of nympho version of Judy Holiday, also has great moments. But she's rather cruelly unflattered by Nanette Acosta's costumes. And both she and Endicott struggle in the opening scene of a heavy-groping tryst, which is more embarrassing than titillating in its explicitness.

Throughout the show, Endicott goes through the farcical motions but fails to exhibit the giddy flair and potent quirkiness of his cohorts. That's too bad, because "Reverse Psychology" needs all four jets firing to achieve maximum mirth.