What makes Alan Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce so utterly captivating is not any one thing but that joyous mix of quasi-mystical elements that makes soufflés rise, parties come off, and audiences leave a theater in a state of euphoria….

[Ayckbourn's people are] both silly and wise. They are neither unduly clever nor outrageously dim-witted, but of average intelligence and average stupidity in a sturdy amalgam. And they can make fools of others and themselves with equal ease, thanks to either quality. They are funny not because they are smarter or more foolish than the rest of us, but because they are exactly like us, only in a slightly tightened, sharpened version, to make a particular brand of lopsidedness reveal its bias more theatrically. Yet unlike, say, Neil Simon, Ayckbourn does not make neuroses and deficiencies appear more cutely epigrammatic, more wittily seductive, than they are. We do not...