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I wrote this play "for the kids." This is one of my "school plays," devised with specific students in mind with a specific didactic purpose in mind. Eugene Hare and I believed strongly that training students involves immersing them through production in as many different kinds of theater as possible. A career in the theater must not just be built on the style of the day, but on developing a set of working methods and approaches to theater, not learning by rote a set of temporally popular solutions. Accordingly we set out to create a four year cycle of productions that would include a great variety of theatrical styles from classical to contemporary, and from American to Far Eastern and as much in between as we could manage.

I should have called A-Hunting We Will Go, Homage to Feydeau since it owes whatever is truly funny to that master of the farce form, Georges Feydeau. When Prof. Hare and I discussed what we wanted to accomplish for our students this year, we decided, among many other things that we needed to give them an opportunity to do a real farce. I set out to find a Feydeau or Labiche or Sardou or some such Scribean trifle on which we could lavish our care. I thought it would be an easy task to find such a play. It was not. The casts were too large or the sets too numerous or the jokes too dated and obscure. What to do. An early Feydeau, Monsieur Chasse, had about the right size cast, but the humour was clearly a hundred years old. Perhaps nothing has a shorter shelf life than comedy. I set out to make an adaptation of Feydeau's play. But I was seduced by the characters and somewhere fairly early in the process, I realized that the characters had a play of their own in mind. So I excluded one or two from Monsieur Chasse, borrowed a few from other of Feydeau's later plays, and even threw in a dash of Carlo Goldoni for good measure, and let the play unfold as it would. I soon discovered that is the only way to manage a farce. And I soon learned that this lightest of theatrical forms is perhaps the most difficult: a successful souffle is infinitely harder to achieve than a hearty roast.

In this endeavor, I was blessed by the support of the ever fresh and imaginative designs of Eugene and Char Hare and the wonderful direction of Scott Plate. I ask only that you sit back and allow yourself to escape into the giddy world of Feydeau's Paris as I imagine it to have been a little over a century ago. If you feel the urge to take notes, or to think deeply about weighty matters, resist it. It will get you nowhere. I hope only that you leave the theatre bien content.

Wayne S. Turney, February 1998