The best comedic moments unfold when these characters are simply interacting face to face.” “Unlike a lot of popular farces, this one isn’t all about doors slamming or mistaken understanding. “The author’s writing is tight, the humor clever and smart,” Smith says of Benjamin, who was a year ahead of her at Harvard University. Those flaws, along with a fairly absurd premise clothed in a rich historical context, provide grist for the humor that runs blithely throughout the narrative. This story is far from unrepentant man-bashing, Smith says, given that characters on both sides of the gender divide have flaws. We expect our patrons to watch intently and stay alert. “The beauty of this particular piece, I think, is that nothing is ‘dumbed down’ for an audience.

“The Explorers Club is a light farce at heart, with wonderfully witty and intellectual humor throughout,” says Smith, who also serves as the theater company’s president and artistic director. It’s the goal of Spotte-Hume (Amber Smith) and her sponsor, club president Lucius Fretway (Bryan Quinn), to set the odd lot of scientific eccentrics straight, in a most amusing fashion, according to director Jillian Smith. “Science is as science does,” the club’s members seem to say, but admitting someone from the “weaker” sex into membership simply sets the Explorers on a road to ruin. The farce by author Nell Benjamin (who earned a 2007 Tony Award nomination as co-author of the musical Legally Blonde) skewers Victorian-era social mores with an eye toward turning the era’s gender politics on its head. Such is the stuff of which The Explorers Club, which opens Soulstice Theatre’s 2015–16 season, is made. She now faces her greatest challenge - convincing a stodgy British scientific society that it’s OK to have a woman in the house. Phyllida Spotte-Hume is a female anthropologist of the first degree and an adventurer who has discovered a lost civilization armed with little more than her intelligence and a spoon.

Soulstice theatre milwaukee