Throughout history audiences have enjoyed stories about putting on plays or making movies. The highlight of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is always the rude mechanicals’ presentation of “the most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe.” (The more lamentable, the better. Audiences especially love badly done attempts to make theater and movies.) Shakespeare learned of this audience propensity when his Love’s Labor’s Lost included the hysterical “show of the Nine Worthies.” Christopher Durang hit the jackpot with his long one act play The Actor’s Nightmare.
George Kelly’s American classic The Torch Bearers features a hapless community theater group. The hit musical Kiss Me Kate surrounds a touring production of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. The list could go on and on, including 42nd Street, The Producers, and A Chorus Line. When films are added, the list grows unmanageable, including Summer Stock, Singing in the Rain, and of course, Waiting for Guffman.
No contemporary play has succeeded with the metatheater genre as much as Michael Frayn’s 1982 Noises Off. Each of the play’s three acts focuses on one day in the life of the play Nothin On’s Act One – the technical rehearsal, Act II – a Wednesday matinee, seen from backstage, and finally ACT III – one of the last performances of the show’s ten week run.
Noises Off is a perfect choice for any community theater whose membership may include rank novices, seasoned professional, those with no training and those with too much training, and many of various permutations in between. Noises Off allows all to look good, have a wonderful time, and provide their audience with an enjoyable time in the theater.
But the selection of Noises Off by the Steppenwolf Theatre was surprising. It doesn’t fit easily into the archive of Steppenwolf type plays.
But then again, why not. Steppenwolf does great plays and Noises Off is the funniest play ever written and it continues the storied theater’s history of taking chances. Nothing is chancier than farce. As the late great Terry Teachout noted;
Classic farce—the kind in which doors get slammed at metronomically regular intervals—is hard to write and harder to stage. Not only does it require timing of immaculately finicky exactitude to ensure that the doors slam on time without decapitating anybody, but it works only when the actors conduct themselves with poker-faced seriousness, behaving as though they’re unaware that the audience is convulsed by their humiliating plight. Nothing kills farce faster than an aren’t-we-silly attitude.[i]
The play-in-a-play/movie genre is not as easy as it usually seems. The actors need to develop two characters – the actor in the play and the character the actor is playing. Players must make the disasters they encounter seem real and spontaneous rather than planned and rehearsed.
And Noises Off is chock full of miscues, and catastrophes. Ora Jones’ Dotty Otley gets the ball rolling as she reveals the middle-aged actress’ shrewdness in her dealings both on the stage and off. Her panic and despair are palpable. Joe Dempsey must have encountered directors like Lloyd Dallas, his portrayal is so true to the details of the harassed and harassing maestro, forced to suffer his fools gladly. Andrew Leeds wonderfully captures the scatterbrained actor Garry Lejeune who always believes he is saying more than he is. Brooke Ashton, the empty-headed bimbo, is in the capable hands of Amanda Fink, who finds layers of complexity in a character who could be easily dismissed. Vaneh Assadourian plays her rival in love, Poppy Norton-Taylor, the ever faithful, never appreciated Assistant Stage Manager. Audrey Francis is wonderful as the Joan Collins wannabe Belinda Blair, whose sole mission seems to be to retain her fragile dignity. James Vincent Meredith is her male match as Frederick Fellowes, the suave nitwit leading man. Max Stewart captures the universal frantic lot of every company manager Tim Allgood. And the veteran Francia Guinan essays the veteran alcoholic thespian character actor Selsdon Mowbray with panache and heart.
All of these actors demonstrate that the characters in farce get laughs from their antics rather than from their words. In farce we shamelessly laugh at the characters rather than with them as we do in comedy.
Director Anna Shapiro wisely seemed to encourage her players to play the situation rather than, as in regular drama, the character. What we see is verification of the great critic Albert Bermel’s conclusion:
“We might say, then, that farce specializes in making circumstances that are normal for some characters abnormal for others, or that in a comedy characters remain rooted in reality while in farce they keep venturing out of reality. And they often do so in everyday settings. Never mind the hyperbolic fears associated with skyscrapers and mountainsides and expanses of rolling ocean: to a fumbling noncook, a run-of-the-mill kitchen equipped with knife racks and hanging saucepans, a food processor and closets stacked with china is a deadly environment.”[ii]
The good news is that Steppenwolf’s Noises Off is very funny. The bad news is that it is not funny in some places where it should be, especially during long swatches of Act II and the final moments of Act III. At those times is seems the actors have veered off the highly calibrated directions given by Mr. Frayn in his text and into free form vampng stage business. That may not be the problem, but that is what the situation looks like.
Noises Off should always be seen whenever is is playing and by whomever is presenting it. It will be a long time until a finer production of the great farce comes our way, so see it while you can. In 1964, journalist Norman Cousins was diagnosed with a painful and debilitating disorder. Conventional medicine had little to offer, so he prescribed his own therapy: liberal doses of vitamin C and laughter. For the latter, Cousins relied on Marx Brothers films and reruns of TV’s Candid Camera, among other movies and shows. His doctors were skeptical, but the patient laughed his way to a successful recovery.
If you are still wearing a Covid mask you owe it to yourself to see Noises Off.
[i] Terry Teachout, “Nine Doors to Delight”, Wall Street Journal January 14, 2016.
[ii] Albert Bermel. Farce. A History from Aristophanes to Woody Allen. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University press, 1990), p. 55
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