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For half an hour or so, Boeing-Boeing lumbers along, slow-footed and messy—mortal failures for a French sex farce. Bradley Whitford works too hard as the Paris playboy who juggles three flight-attendant fiancées, and Christine Baranski, miscast as Bernard’s gruff maid, shows little of a farceuse’s polish. The arrival of Bernard’s school chum only makes matters worse: After ten years running London’s Globe Theatre, the great Mark Rylance finally returns to New York in an open-ended run, and it’s this?

Then something sublime happens—not in an instant or a single scene, but rather in a series of little shifts that have the cumulative effect (metaphorically speaking) of Rylance ducking into a phone booth and reemerging in superhero tights. As bad weather and new airplanes disrupt Bernard’s girlfriend-management scheme, and the coils of farce start drawing tighter, his performance as the beta-male Robert becomes one weirdly inventive, punishingly funny moment after another.

A lesser actor might have made Robert a naïf or a prig—people don’t do such things back home in the Midwest, you see—but Rylance gives him a wonderfully doleful twist. Soft-spoken and bow-tied, this Robert could be a cousin to the sad-eyed Stan Laurel, resigned to absorbing the kick that’s sure to arrive any moment now. This makes it all the funnier when he’s ravaged by Bernard’s American fiancée (Kathryn Hahn), or when he puffs out his chest and bellows at the Italian fiancée (Gina Gershon), or when he delivers a spanking that appears to shock even himself. His apotheosis, though, comes when Robert sees something that no son of Wisconsin is ever really prepared to see. Channeling Buster Keaton, he reacts by doing absolutely nothing. Why bother doing more? We know Robert so well by that point that his blank gaze is enough to make us howl.

It says a lot about the creakiness of Marc Camoletti’s sixties comedy that even a performance this delicious can only sustain the play when Rylance gets a deserving foil. She belatedly arrives in the form of Bernard’s German fiancée, whose fierce interrogation of Robert gives the evening a genuine “Who’s that?” moment. The answer is Mary McCormack, an inspired comedienne who plays Gretchen as a Valkyrie in a miniskirt, and whose daffy work here suggests that screwball heaven isn’t yet empty. — Jeremy McCarter