Alan Ayckbourn is a playwright who likes to play with the minds of his audience in a way most playful and fun. Once you know “Communicating Doors” is a play with time travel in it, you can sit back and enjoy the ride.

He reveals things in this fairly fast-paced comedy-thriller at just the right speed to keep the audience interested without giving everything away. In fact, part of the fun of this show is in figuring out what is just beyond the doors and when a particular scene is taking place. Director Randy Lake at the Great Escape Stage Company explains much of this during the curtain speech, but such explanations are unnecessary as the playwright handles it adroitly.

It starts with the arrival of a prostitute – though she prefers the term sex specialist or dominatrix. She has second thoughts about her summons when she realizes her customer is a dying man not even strong enough to tie his shoelaces. Her reservations increase when she discovers he doesn’t want her for sex, but to sign and deliver some documents. She then ends up at the mercy of a villain who doesn’t want what she now knows to be known. Her escape and hope at salvation comes through some communicating doors.

Great Escape has two fantastic leads in what is mostly an ensemble piece. Callie Bussell as Poopay Dayseer and Debbie Culver as Ruella Welles are an awesome team and the show is most entertaining when the two of them are on stage together. They play off each other well and their chemistry is real, making the story’s eventual summary very believable and satisfying.

Bussell doesn’t look old enough to be 33, but in every other way she creates the dominatrix who is as likely to burst into tears as have someone shivering on his knees. She is the archetypical whore with a heart of gold, sensitive and frightened, pulled into situations far beyond her understanding. She follows a great arc for her character, showing changes that occur even faster than Poopay, eventually Phoebe, can understand. It is a lovely thing to contrast who she is at the beginning of the show with who she is at the end, and Bussell handles it with not just her voice, but through making physical changes, aided by Culver’s costumes.

Culver is wise and smart, making Ruella able to understand things quickly and portraying a middle-aged woman who is sharp in her thinking and fast on her feet. She has excellent comic timing and was able to cover well when other performers forgot their lines or didn’t make their entrances.

Caleb Knutson’s Julian Goodman is suitably intimidating, though not believable in the early scenes as a man in his 60s – or even a few decades close to that. In fact, he looks to be in his late 20s or early 30s and no effort is made to age him one way or the other, as it was for Alan Elliott’s Reece Welles. Elliott is amusing both as an old man and as a randy young man, chasing his bride about the hotel room.

Karen York plays a ditzy Jessica Welles who is almost too soft in early scenes with her, though she has little time to assert herself immediately. She is far more entertaining in her final scene where she has time to play up some of the character’s quirks. Tim Culver plays the security man, Harold Palmer, who gets called in to deal with odd trespassers at the hotel suite where all the action takes place. He has several comic moments that add to the hilarity of the farce.

Lake conducts this fast-paced farce, finding ways to make each character believable in two of three different time periods. Doubling as the set designer, Lake makes excellent use of the small space at Great Escape Stage Company. There are six doors in this small space, including double doors out to a balcony. All of the doors are highly functional and take a lot of abuse during the course of the show.

Great Escape is a theater that has been transitioning to a professional theater from its community theater roots. With performances of such actresses as Debbie Culver and Bussell, they make good progress toward such a goal. Where they are still held back are by those actors who don’t know their lines and entrances and rely on others to cover for them when they go up – this even after the show’s opening was delayed a week because the production wasn’t ready for its opening night. There was a fair amount of noise backstage from people moving around that distracted from the show.

It is also a difficult thing in February to not be ready an hour before curtain and make your audience wait outside in subzero temperatures.

That said, this is an entertaining offering that challenges the cast and is worth watching for the laughs, the twisted plot, and the excellent chemistry between the main players.

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