Nearly two centuries ago, Labiche wrote a short vaudeville in which he stages the misadventures of two carousers, Lenglumé and Mistingue, who are opposites in every respect: social standing, manner of being, way of speaking... And yet, a night of drunken revelry — of which neither retains the slightest memory — brought them so close that they are found together in Mistingue's bed.

What happened that night?

The question might seem trivial, were it not for a cluster of clues leading them to believe that, during their nighttime escapade, they together murdered a woman. While the two men are consumed by anguished doubt over their potential guilt, Mme Lenglumé, unable to comprehend her husband's agitation, orders him to return to a normal life — starting with the baptism of his cousin Potard's son. Potard, who conveniently shows up to demand a small sum of money to cover the debts incurred by his wife's pregnancy.

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Amid mixed-up misunderstandings, lies, troubling coincidences, and the desire to save appearances rather than the truth, this play toys with pretense, pushing the characters toward increasingly cruel acts, until — for the span of a single day — this closed little world is shaken to its core.

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Four actors take hold of this text.

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But how can we embody — and deconstruct — Labiche's bourgeoisie? What should we do with these selfish characters, trapped in their relationships of domination, obsessed with their image and indifferent to the world, hungrier for immediate pleasures than for progressive ideas?

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And what if these characters, our 200-year-old elders, resembled us more than we care to imagine?

Labiche constructs a theatrical mechanism of unrelenting precision, a diabolical and hilarious machine that we will seize upon to explore, the double, dissimilarity, truth and falsehood, the image we present of ourselves, and that blindness which makes us prefer signs to reality.

 

We will seek to give the audience the vividness and humor typical of nineteenth-century vaudeville, while exploiting the flaws and inconsistencies of our own era.