from The Schenectady Gazette
"It Runs in the Family" is a clever and classic farce

Humorous show is now featured at Curtain Call.
By Bob Couture

“It Runs in the Family”, a kind of classical English farce by Ray Cooney, is currently running rampant at Curtain Call Theatre. The play holds its own and should appeal to a variety of theatergoers.

This particular show is basically a kind of silly story in which doctors play a waiting game to establish the true parenthood of a certain young man as they try to practice their field of medicine.

From the Past
Simply put, Dr. Hubert Bonney is confronted by Leslie, a young man he apparently fathered a number of years before. To complicate matters, he is scheduled to give an important speech at a medical convention of neurologists. Things become rather difficult as another doctor, Mike Connolly, is also accused of the deed. In the end, of course, all is somewhat but not wholly resolved.

This is a work in which resolutions are not really important or even expected, and the fun is in watching the characters go from one extreme to the other. And as is usual in the farce, just when it seems that things couldn’t get any worse, they do.

Casting Well Done
At Curtain Call, as usual, casting is well done. Aaron Holbritter absolutely scores as the put-upon Dr. Bonney. Holbritter has a fluid personality and sparkling stage presence, though he does tend at times to shout a bit too much. However, in this case, the spectrum of his acting well fits the character, as do his often-mercurial actions. This is a well-controlled performance that helps us comprehend Cooney’s comic genius in this work.

Others also contribute to the wholeness of the production. John McDermott is excellent as the somewhat phlegmatic Dr. David Mortimer, who cannot always figure out what is going on, while David Meyersburg contributes his bit as Sir Wiloughby Drake, charged with introducing Dr. Bonney to the convention and thoroughly confused with the goings on.

Monica Cangero is quite effective as Jane Tate, charged with the task of reminding Dr. Bonney of his past, while young Stephen Hensel does quite well as Leslie, the product of Bonney’s past.

Steve Fletcher is the smart director for this show, understanding well the nature of farce and making excellent work of the numerous one-liners and incipient double entendres. Farce means physical humor, and this production has plenty of it.
Do enjoy wholly this clever holiday break.