Theater Spotlight: Funny Money

Ray Cooney's Funny Money is the sort of farce in which the audience derives much of its pleasure from watching unlikely characters sweat and stress through their machinations. If they're going to be such thoroughly mendacious asses, in other words, it's good fun to watch them on the razor's edge of a self-induced nervous breakdown. The action commences on the birthday of Henry (Tom Stolz), an accountant who is late arriving home for a dinner with friends (all the while, one suspects, pondering the razors in the bathroom and the tensile strength of the skin on his inner wrists). Today came with a twist, though, and when Henry arrives home to his befuddled wife, Jean (Judith Heneghan), he grabs the phone, dials British Airways, and requests a ticket—to anywhere, as long as the plane is leaving that night. Turns out Henry picked up the wrong briefcase during his trudge home, and it contains a fortune in cash. What follows is an evening in which the household is visited by two cops on two separate matters (Julian Bailey's lawman is oily and lascivious, while James Cada's is one of the few characters who seems to hail from a dimension resembling our own, though the detective is required to overlook so much gratingly contrived behavior that, had this been real life, he would surely have been tempted just to shoot everyone and plant false evidence). In due course, Henry gets his friends Betty (Dianne Benjamin-Hill) and Vic (Steve Shaffer) wrapped up in his mess as well. Betty is visibly turned on by the prospect of a bit of wrongdoing, while Vic approaches the matter as just another trial to suffer through. After a while you feel like compiling an anti-comedy checklist: Incessant doorbell ringing? Check. A big wet spit-take? Check. Threatening, incoherent foreigners? Three for three! But something else starts to happen as well. While there are any number of laugh-out-loud moments here, and while surely the show never asks you to take it seriously, by the end you're rooting for these hollowed-out souls to somehow come out on top. A big factor is ace acting (under Stolz's direction), in which each character is sharply delineated and clearly living inside his or her perspective with no hope of envisioning anything else. An exception is Heneghan's Jean, who starts out with a shred of reason but ends up downing a lake of booze and snapping from the pressure. Everyone here is so ground down by the mundane, the hypocritical, the passionless, that most of them leap over the edge of sanity when presented with the prospect of escape. Fuck the man, you feel them saying. The revolution will come in a cushy hotel room, in a place where no one knows me. With room service, comrade. $19.50-$32. 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday. 5175 Meadville Street, Excelsior. 952.474.5951. Through September 26