In West Philly, real life and death interfere with the Curio Theatre comedy ‘A Funeral Farce’

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Curio Theatre, a small theater company in West Philadelphia, was planning to end its 2024-2025 season with “A Funeral Farce,” a comedy set in a funeral home. Previews were to begin April 30.

But real life, and death, intervened. The three founding members of Curio are coping with three cases of cancer, one of which is terminal.

The cousin of Curio’s artistic director Paul Kuhn, with whom he is very close, is in hospice care with end-stage cancer. Kuhn’s wife and managing director of Curio, Gay Carducci, has been diagnosed with endometrial cancer, for which she has begun chemotherapy. Kuhn’s sister Aetna Gallagher, an artistic associate of Curio, is tending to her husband’s cancer treatment.

All of this comes on the heels of the sudden death of Curio’s longtime publicist, Carrie Gorn.

A farce centered on death would have to wait. Curio canceled “A Funeral Farce” before it opened.

The comedy was scheduled a year ago to close out Curio’s 20th anniversary season. At that time, there were no cancer diagnoses among the creative team. Kuhn and Gallagher would have been both acting and designing: Kuhn is a set builder and Gallagher is a costume designer. Carducci was going to direct.

“There were two weeks when we were just at hospitals,” Carducci said. “We had to sit down, the three of us, and say, ‘This is ridiculous. Our family has to come first. We cannot all three do this.’”

“I immediately got in touch with our board,” she said. “They were all, like, ‘The show must not go on.”

Putting the fun in ‘Funeral’

The script is a zany send-up of confusion and incompetence in an otherwise somber circumstance. A funeral home accidentally double-books itself with funerals for the White and Whyte families, respectively. A wrong body goes to the crematorium. A bereaved man will not stop singing “Time in a Bottle” to his departed loved one. Nobody seems to be in charge.

Kuhn wrote the play almost 20 years ago with Jared Reed and debuted it in 2009 as a cross between the TV show “Six Feet Under,” about a family-run funeral home, and the British show “Fawlty Towers,” starring John Cleese as an inept hotel owner.

“It’s that kind of humor,” Carducci said. “He’s dumb. Nobody does anything right in this place, and the woman’s trying to run it all. That kind of thing.”

It was fairly well-received in 2009. Reviewers called it “jolly” and “genuinely funny” despite some heavy-handed exposition. For the 2025 revival, Kuhn trimmed the two-hour script down to 90 minutes.

Death and comedy are familiar bedfellows. The British comedy troupe Monty Python mined death for laughs in nearly every movie it ever made. “Death at a Funeral,”, treading similar ground as “A Funeral Farce” in 2007 with a plot about a funeral gone wrong, was remade in 2010.

Whatever you think of how the corpse portrayed by Terry Kiser was manipulated in 1989’s “Weekend at Bernie’s,” enough people laughed that it merited a sequel four years later. Curio Theatre previously indulged in morbid humor with its 2020 production of “The Complete Deaths,” a play that mashes up all of Shakespeare’s death scenes.

Kuhn’s relatives, who traveled to Philadelphia to be with their dying family member, did not see it the same way.

“All my family is coming in from Canada and I’m getting these questions: Why would you want to do this play right now?” he said. “They’re not theater people, so they don’t understand that you plan this a year in advance.”

“Their thoughts are probably that it’s sad and morbid,” Carducci added. “They don’t get that there’s really not one drop of sadness in any part in this play.”

‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’

Kuhn said cancer diagnoses rarely rob people of their senses of humor.

“If you are outside the hospital room where we find ourselves basically living now at the Perelman Center, which has amazing care, you would think there’s a party going on inside,” he said.

Kuhn has been spending a lot of time in Perelman’s waiting rooms, where his cousin has been receiving radiation treatments. His Canadian relatives have been joining him.

They discovered firsthand that a hospital waiting room can be a breeding ground for farce.

“The other day four of us went and someone in the waiting room spilled a cup of water, so I immediately jumped up and got some paper towel and was wiping it up,” Kuhn said. “I ran to get more paper towel. My other cousin, who lives in British Columbia, he poured more water on the ground.”

“I went, ‘Jesus, it’s growing.’ So I patted it down more and I went back to get more towel,” he said. “This went on four more times until there were so many people in radiation laughing hysterically, trying to hold back.”

“That was the very same cousin that asked me, ‘Why are you doing a play like this right now?’” Kuhn added.

The cancellation of “A Funeral Farce” may be permanent. Initially, Kuhn and Carducci intended to reprogram the play in the 2025-2026 season, or the following season.

But the play seems to be cursed. When Curio debuted “Farce” in 2009, Kuhn was not able to attend the opening because he had to be in Canada, where his father had just died.

There are too many bad associations with this play for Kuhn and his family. This may be the death of “Farce.”

“I think there’s an omen surrounding this play,” he said. “Not to be grim, but we’ve decided to bury this production.”

Kuhn and company may be down, but not out: Curio Theatre has announced the first production of its next season. “Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors,” a Bram Stoker parody that premiered off-Broadway in 2023, will be staged in October.