‘Right Bed, Wrong Husband’ will have audience changing their wills and trusts

Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre’s next off-Broadway production centers around a young bachelor by the name of Ted who needs more money from the trust fund his parents created prior to their demise. His uncle serves as trustee and is a notorious pinchpenny. But he can get more money once he’s married, so Ted tells him he’s gotten hitched. But Ted’s ill-conceived plan goes awry when his uncle pays him an unannounced visit. This is the set-up for “Right Bed, Wrong Husband,” a farce in three acts by playwrights Neil and Caroline Schaffner that opens June 15.

The summary for the play describes Ted as basically honest, and reluctant to be drawn into a vortex of intrigue. While that seems dubious at best, we can infer from the fact that Ted’s parents felt the need to create a trust for him that their son was at minimum a spendthrift and at worst an irresponsible boy with a track record of poor decisions. So when Ted’s uncle drops in unexpectedly and mistakes a pretty girl who’s married to Ted’s best friend as Ted’s bride, Ted not only doesn’t correct his uncle’s errant conclusion, he convinces his friends to go along with the charade. The poor decisions cascade from there.

But it’s the uncle who’s the unwitting shill in Ted’s web of deceptions. Each time Ted’s uncle kisses the girl he believes to be Ted’s wife, her real husband and Ted’s best friend gets angrier and angrier – all to Ted’s perverse delight. When Ted’s maid calls, he mistakes her for something else. And then he catches Ted kissing a third woman, who is the girl to whom Ted is actually engaged. But the confusion and high jinx really amp up when night falls and it is time to go to bed. Add to this volatile mix the neighborhood drunk who habitually sacks out at Ted’s when he’s locked out of his own house, and you have a climax of enormous merriment.

In the cozy confines of the Broadway Palm’s side theater, the laughs are likely to spill out into the aisles. But the biggest beneficiaries of “Right Bed, Wrong Husband” may be the area’s estate planning lawyers who will be asked by audience members to add residuary trusts to their wills and living trusts for the Teds in their families. Just one problem. If the candidates have also

taken in a performance of this very funny, highly convoluted farce, they may have difficulty finding anyone to administer the trust.

June 7, 2017.

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