`Royal Family': Funny play about the acting life.

Byline: REVIEW by Paul Denison The Register-Guard

EDITOR'S NOTE: Register-Guard arts writer Paul Denison reviews the first four plays to open at the 2004 Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. ASHLAND - Last year, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival staged Noel Coward's "Present Laughter," a comedy about theater that was witty and hilarious but not that engaging emotionally. Very British, you know.

This season, the festival is presenting a very similar American comedy, "The Royal Family" by George Kaufman and Edna Ferber. It's just as funny, it but treats the characters more insightfully and sympa- thetically.

In the festival production directed by Peter Amster, strong performances by three women and one man give the show its warm heart. But the entire ensemble wears hearts on sleeves while tickling funnybones.

"The Royal Family" consists primarily of a matriarch, Fanny Cavendish; her daughter, Julie; and her granddaughter, Gwen. All three live in Fanny's huge New York apartment dominated by a huge portrait of Fanny's late husband in a swashbuckling role.

The scalloped edges of Richard Hay's busy but elegant set make it look something like a clam shell that has opened to show a realm both cozy and claustrophobic.

Inside, Fanny (Dee Maaske) is recovering from a long illness and itching to get back on stage. Julie (Judith-Marie Bergan) is thinking about giving up her flourishing New York career to marry and see the world with an old flame. Gwen (Linda Morris) is giving it up to marry a handsome stockbroker and start a family.

Lovingly but selfishly trying to keep the Cavendish dynasty going is their manager, Oscar Wolfe (Michael Hume), whose tolerance for the family's foibles bespeaks deep love as well as good business sense.

Maaske shows strength, subtlety, a commanding manner and dry wit as Fanny, who lives for the stage, and Morris credibly shows Gwen's wrenching two-love turmoil. Bergan is tremendously appealing as Julie, a high-strung star who delivers an impassioned speech about giving up the stage, then cries, ``Oh, my God,'' and dashes out when she realizes that she's about to miss a curtain.

The family also includes Fanny's son (Brent Harris), an over-actor whose real talent is getting in trouble and running away; her brother and sister-in-law (Richard Howard and Catherine Lynn Davis), whose ambitions exceed their talent; and two scurrying servants (Eileen DeSandre and Robert Vincent Frank).

Julie and Gwen's hot-and-cold love affair with the stage is complicated by their love interests (Leith Burke and Jeffrey King), both businessmen who fail to see any value, commercial or otherwise, in acting. In the heat of an argument, Gwen tells her suitor that she can name famous actors going back hundreds of years and challenges him to name even two 17th century stockbrokers.

"The Royal Family" includes plenty of outright hilarity, much of it exuberant scenery-chewing by Brent Harris, who starred in "Present Laughter."

But much of the humor is subtler and quieter, based on deep understanding of how theater people act on stage, off stage and with outsiders, all brought out in finely honed ensemble work under Amster's direction.

"The Royal Family" will be in residence in the festival's Angus Bowmer Theatre through October 30.