Reading playwright Michael Frayn’s bio in the program for the Alley Theatre’s production of “Noises Off,” I couldn’t help but wonder if this widely produced 1982 parody couldn’t just as easily be titled, “The Author’s Revenge.” For in taking the audience into the unseen bowels of a touring production of an imaginary play aptly titled “Nothing On,” Frayn not only turns the spotlight on the struggle of a script to survive in the hands of a cast and crew whose failings range from alcoholism to temper tantrums. If the audience can stop laughing long enough to think—a trick in itself for this side-splitting show—something like “how does any play ever get performed?” comes to mind.
As the author of a dozen plays ranging from “Copenhagen,” a brainy play about historical physicists, to the classic farce about a college reunion, “Donkey’s Years,” as well as translations of Chekhov, Frayn surely has amassed backstage stories that weave into “Noises Off,” where audiences are allowed to see a play in three different forms: its final much behind schedule dress rehearsal (Act I), a performance seen from backstage (Act II), and its final tired production (Act III). In other words, he shows us everything the audience is NOT supposed to see: missed cues, dropped lines, frayed relationships, and a use of props that would make Moe, Larry, and Curly “nyuk, nyuk, nyuk” with envy.
Of course the irony in such a script is that it needs top-notch performances from actors, designers, and crew to pull it off, and the Alley’s current production has all three under the more than capable direction of Brandon Weinbrenner. He uses all his tools to give the audience a witty, non-stop laughing experience that uses exploded expectations and canny repetitions as fuel. Though doing this show must be an energy-draining experience, Weinbrenner insures each carefully timed movement falls safely into place. It feels like watching a drunk clown on a high-wire: you can’t help wondering how in all his slips and tumbles he doesn’t break his neck even as the clown himself remains comically safe in his professional precision—a sensation Mark Twain captures in print when he sends Huck Finn to the circus. Such careful blocking and design is the director’s witchcraft, and Weinbrenner has mastered his spells.
He’s aided by a vigorous and daring cast of Alley company players, headed by Elizabeth Bunch as the aging actress Dotty Otley and Todd Waite as the frustrated director Lloyd Dallas. They are the show’s dignified elder statesmen—ideal individuals to have sit on a cactus or juggle plates of sardines that fly across the stage. Beyond Bunch and Waite, every actor is perfectly cast for his or her part: Dylan Godwin as the would-be-playboy (both on and off stage) Garry Lejeune, Nicole Rodenburg as the oversexed tax official and an actress who can’t keep her contact lenses in her eyes, Christopher Salazar as the wealthy house owner evading the tax man and an actor who faints in the face of violence, and David Rainey as an old star who’s crawled out of a whiskey bottle to play a hapless burglar on stage. These stand out, but all the cast find moments to shine even in the smaller parts.
That said, the actors are almost outshone by the set designs of Tim Mackabee. Act I opens on a posh and imposing English country home: two floors linked by twisting, narrow steps and doors everywhere to slam and stick—not to mention a large glass window to look out on a garden and access for burglary. However, as Act II starts, this massive set does a 180 degree turn to show the shabby backstage where the actors store their props, await their cues, and shimmy down ladders and raw wooden stairs—a set just transparent enough to allow some of what’s happening on the front stage to bleed through. Act III begins with the stage revolving again to the original set but one now showing its wear: missing doorknobs and unattached phone cords suggesting how wearing repeated performances can become.
And though the stage shifts, the basic format remains the same. Frayn finds fresh humor in each stage of his fictional production. The comedy never flags but instead moves forward in varying rhythms.
This is a true audience-pleaser. It has its ideas, but thinking is not required—except with inside-the-theater jokes such as one about an actor playing Shakespeare’s Richard III and being sidelined by a bad back. But if these fly over anyone’s head, “Noises Off” has gushers of slapstick to keep everyone engaged.
Squeeze “Noises Off” onto your schedule. Especially in this political season, we need the laughs, and you just may discover you cannot look at other stage productions the same way again.
“Noises Off” is at Houston’s Alley Theatre through Oct. 27.
Robert Donahoo is a professor at Sam Houston State University and reviews plays for The Courier.
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