Pacing off in Steel Beam's 'Don't Drink the Water'

Farce is a delicate thing.

It needs a brisk pace to be effective. And the actors have to perform with cheeky confidence and controlled abandon, thereby creating on stage a kind of comedic chaos that leaves an audience breathless.

That's true for “Don't Drink the Water,” a creaky 1966 Cold War comedy by Woody Allen, made slightly more timely in light of recent revelations of Russian interference in U.S. and European elections.

Steel Beam Theatre's revival delivers some of the controlled mayhem this kind of comedy demands. Director Bernie Weiler crafts wacky, slapstick-fueled moments that are ably executed by the more experienced cast members. Displaying a flair for broad comedy and a sense of timing, Paul Anderson and Siobhan Bremer mine laughs as a bickering, middle-aged couple from New Jersey. Joe Billquist earns chuckles as an eccentric Orthodox priest (in a nation where 99 percent of the population is atheist) who narrates the action.

Unfortunately, other performances feel timid and unsure. They bog down the show and make it feel longer than its two-hour running time, which is exactly what you don't want in a farce.

Set in 1966, in a small American embassy in an unnamed Communist country behind the Iron Curtain, “Don't Drink the Water” sends up Cold War qualms and Americans abroad.

Erik Martin plays Axel Magee, a well-intentioned but inept foreign service officer who owes his job to nepotism. When his father, the ambassador, departs for a brief trip to the United States, he names Axel as his stand-in over the more efficient, albeit disapproving Kilroy (Paul Thornton).

Within moments of the ambassador's departure, an international misunderstanding threatens to set the Cold War boiling.

New Jersey caterer Walter Hollander (Anderson), on holiday with his wife, Marion (Bremer), and their twenty-something daughter Susan (the gingery, personable Keaton Stewart), races into the embassy with Communist Party apparatchik Krojack (the blustering R. Scott Purdy) and a squadron of soldiers on their heels.

After Walter inadvertently takes photographs of a top-secret military installation, Krojack labels him and his family as spies, forcing them to remain in the embassy or face arrest by the Communists. Nerves fray, love blooms and escape plans are hatched within the confines of the embassy, which the family shares with Father Drobney (Billquist), a dissident priest and aspiring magician who sought asylum at the embassy six years earlier and never left.

Steel Beam's small stage hinders Weiler's slapstick, making comical chases feel stilted. But his cast soldiers on. If only they could pick up the pace.