There’s this guy, see, and he lives in a hot apartment in Paris and he’s got these three ladies, all of whom think he’s going to marry them and they drop in and out of his place and he keeps track of all this dropping in and out by using the timetables of the airlines that the three ladies work for.

Just saying it takes your breath away. But that’s the essence of the plot of "Boeing Boeing," the French farce that opened the season Friday night for Milwaukee Chamber Theatre.

The setup for the thing is classic farce. Bernard (Brian J. Gill) lives in Paris in the 1960s. He is a bachelor and is visited by his friend from Wisconsin, Robert (Ryan Schabach). Bernard quickly explains the deal to his friend.

There are three women in his life, all stewardesses. Gabriella (Amber Smith), an Italian, Gloria (Anne Walaszek) and American and Gretchen (Samantha Sostarich) a German. Each woman thinks she is engaged to him and they have no idea that there are other women in Barnard’s life. They fly in and fly out and Bernard keeps the whole thing straight by using the timetable and keeping notes in his little black book.Robert is aghast.

"You have all of the benefits of married life," Bernard explains, "but none of the drawbacks."

Overseeing the whole thing is Berthe (Marcella Kearns), Bernard’s housekeeper who keeps up appearances by wearing different appropriate aprons for each visiting woman.

This is a farce, so you know where this is going long before you get there. There are six doors in the marvelous set by Brandon Kirkham and before too long you know that people are going to be moving in and out of those doors in a syncopated rhythm that allows for the women to just miss each other’s entrance and exit.

In the end true love wins out, but nobody really cares. The story is not the important thing here. The only thing that really matters is the acting and the characters.

And this production has it all. Like any good farce, the characters are one-dimensional and almost stereotypes. We aren’t playing Hamlet or Lady Macbeth here.

Gabriella is a romantic Italian, Gloria is the American technician and Gretchen is, surprise, the dominating German.

The first act, 90 minutes' worth, is the setup as we see the relationship between Bernard and his friend, his girlfriends and his housekeeper. The second act is where the payoff comes with the slamming of doors and the panicked Robert trying to help his equally panicked friend.

The cast of this show is a strong one with each of the flying girls filling the mind of ten-year-old boys who used to read Esquire to see hot women. The each have a multitude of sex appeal and it’s easy to understand why Bernard wants to keep each one around.

As Bernard, Gill captures all of the open frankness of the playboy. He knows what he’s doing isn’t perfect behavior but he’s having so much fun he doesn’t really care.

This play, though, really belongs to Schabach and Kearns who give us all a lesson in the perfection of comedic timing and the kind of funny that we used to see in films with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. It was like watching two veteran Saturday Night Live comics play with each other.

Schabach gave his Robert two emotions, deadpan and worried as hell. As he continued to protect his friend while falling for the first girl to kiss him, Schabach showed how much a pause can mean as he waited until just the right moment before hitting the laugh line.

Kearns was an absolute marvel. She was dressed as a frump and resembled nothing so much as a Cro-Magnon woman sulking around trying to make sense of all the craziness around her. She gave us the most delirious laughs of the night.

The scene when Robert is laying on a giant bean bag chair and Berthe nestles next to him on a couch, her foot daintily trying to seduce his calf while he is flummoxed by this moment of her bliss and his agony  is about as funny as it’s going to get this season.

While there are plenty of laughs in this production, it is not without its difficult moments.

For one thing it is nearly three hours long, with a 15-minute intermission. It would have been easy and perhaps wise to trim some of the extra detailed moments from the first act and get us into the money lane without such a long wait.

The perfect farce has a well-paced setup and gradually climbs into the stratosphere of frenzy when an audience barely has time to catch its breath. That frenzy was missing from this production.  What happened was that there were too many moments that didn’t really move things along and they stopped the roller coaster of hilarity we had been on just moments earlier.

"Boeing Boeing" runs  through Aug. 30 and information on tickets and showtimes is available here.