NEIL SIMON'S RUMORS IS APPROPRIATELY subtitled: "A Farce." True to the name, it's the sort of comedy that runs the risk of coming across as more silly than witty. But an able cast and smart directing choices can render it side-splittingly funny, as demonstrated with glorious success in the current production showing on the Loeb mainstage.

Call it the Neverending Party, or the Anniversary from Hell. The play is set in present-day New York in the home of an upperclass couple, Charlie and Myra Brock. It is the night of their 10th wedding anniversary, and they are giving--or are supposed to be giving--a party to celebrate the occasion. The first guests, Ken Gorman (Jed Silverstein '97) and wife Chris (Abigail H. Gray '99), arrive just in time to hear the sound of a gunshot. Upon rushing up to the bedroom, they discover that Charlie, for motives unknown, has shot himself in the ear. Myra is nowhere to be seen.

As the rest of the Brocks' friends arrive, couple by couple (four total), the guests already present try to prevent the newcomers from learning of Charlie's apparent suicide attempt--for attempted suicide is a criminal offense and, more importantly, a potential scandal for poor Charlie and Myra, not to mention the guests. But the bumbling attempts at a cover-up, further jeopardized by a second, accidental gunshot, dissolve into utter chaos with the end of Act One. Act Two confronts all the couples with the necessity of explaining matters to a pair of police officers.

The running joke, of course, is that the audience never once sees Charlie or Myra throughout the course of the play, though their private lives become the primary concern of everyone on stage. Despite what the title promises, rumors don't really play a crucial role in all this. There's no classic stripping away of pretenses and whispered suggestions to reveal deliciously nasty truths and scandals that implicate all the characters. Nothing, in fact, is revealed: we never do find out what exactly happened to Charlie and Myra, and it doesn't matter. What does matter is the effect their unseen presence (or absence) has on a group of affluent, complacent New York professionals. Having made it big doesn't conceal the fact that they're ill-equipped and totally unprepared for dealing with a crisis of this kind. Throw in a case of whiplash, back spasms, temporary deafness and all manner of quirks and mishaps, and you've got manifold ways of making them look even more foolish.

The success of this kind of sit-comish humor (it is the situation comedy par excellence) relies heavily upon expression and delivery, and this cast rises magnificently to the occasion. They're all so good that it's difficult--if not impossible--to pick out particular stars. Among the men folk, it's a toss-up between Erik Amblad '98-'99 as the jovial but whiplash-afflicted and increasingly harried tax analyst Lenny Ganz, who takes over from Ken as mise-en-scene of "keeping up appearances," and Jesse J. Hawkes '99 as the psychotherapist Ernie Cusack, who's at once the shrewdest and the farthest off-base of the entire party.

Yet Silverstein as Ken, the anxious lawyer, also shines, particularly during his bout with deafness: his superbly comic expressions render even the old gag of mishearings and misunderstandings a la Cuthbert Calculus extremely funny. Daniel Goor '97 almost steals the second act as the sardonic, tough-talking Officer Welch, but Amblad's Lenny makes a sweeping comeback with the rip-roaring rigmarole that brings the farce to its zany climax.

AND THE WOMEN? GRAY'S QUERULOUS, chain-smoking, scatterbrained Chris matches husband Ken for droll facial expressions. In this respect, she edges Catherine M. Ingman '98, who plays sharp-tongued, slightly scornful Claire Ganz. Both, however, are upstaged by Jordanna M. Brodsky '99 as a hilariously dippy, brocade-clad Julia Child-like chef--aptly named Cookie--married to Ernie. Indeed, the odd-couple of Hawkes and Brodsky wins hands-down as the best pairing in the show, and it's a tribute to their skill that the somewhat corny physical humor delineated to them (especially Cookie) becomes irresistibly funny in their hands. They make the fourth couple, Glenn and Cassie Cooper (Seth H. Goldbarg '97 and Taya L. Weiss '99), seem rather anticlimactic. The latter's portrayal of an uppity couple on the rocks--acerbic, paranoically jealous female and taciturn, spectacle-shunning male--has been done before, whereas there's surely never been a couple quite like this Ernie and Cookie.

In other elements besides the acting, this production is dead-on. It never misses a chance to up the ante through the clever use of visual and sound effects. Each time a new couple arrives, they are presaged by the glow of their headlights; then their silhouettes are thrown up, vastly enlarged, against the screen that marks the front door, creating an effect both menacing and inherently comical. The second act begins with no sound except that of Ken chewing and swallowing his dinner: magnified to such a volume that it reverberates through the theater, ironically underscoring Ken's loss of hearing.

The set remains the same in both acts, a well-constructed, quite impressively realistic representation of the interior of a wealthy contemporary home. There are plenty of doors for the various characters to rush in and out of, and open and shut behind them. And again, the occasional slyly humorous touch: Lenny, describing his neck as "stretched out and over to one side, like a Modigliani painting," looks up to see...a Modigliani painting.

When all's said and done, no one aspect of the production can be singled out as the key to its success. This presentation of Rumors is a quintessential team effort, and fortunately one that works brilliantly. You'll never get so many laughs for your money's worth.