Farce is so difficult. You need significant chops to pull it off, so a non-Equity production of The Play That Goes Wrong struck me as a dicey proposition, but this creative team is clearly drawing on a huge treasure chest of non-Equity experience. They’re rocking this show. This Black Box Theatre Co. production is selling out and it deserves to be.
Written by Henry Lewis, Henry Shields, and Jonathan Sayer, the script transports us to the opening night of the Cornley Drama Society’s production of The Murder at Haversham Manor, a twenties whodunnit that bears striking similarities to Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap.
Everything you can think of — and much more that you can’t — goes wrong, starting with a distinctly undead corpse that gets dropped from its fabric stretcher and has to inchworm its way off the stage.
And that’s the thing: The Play That Goes Wrong runs on the surprise and hysteria of escalating catastrophes and the absurdity of increasingly desperate actors trying to cover them up. There’s a huge amount of slapstick as set pieces fall apart, and there are performance nightmares, including multiple forms of cuing screw-ups.
Crucially, The Play That Goes Wrong also runs on actors’ timing and inventiveness.
A barebones plot synopsis of The Murder at Haversham Manor: after Charles Haversham is found dead, Inspector Carter arrives to crack the case. Suspects include Charles’s fiancée Florence and her brother Thomas, Charles’s brother Cecil, and Charles’s butler Perkins.
Before I start talking about specific successes, let me offer three quick caveats. Because it goes on too long, the preshow business, in which the running crew sets up the stage, gets repetitive. There are a couple of passages of physical business that overstay their welcome. And, although actor Matt Loop, who’s playing a sound technician named Trevor, has his moments, he needs to find a more heightened sense of his character’s type to fulfill the play’s stylistic mandate.
But those are the only nits I have to pick.
Actor Jordon Navratil knows exactly what he’s doing. Playing Chris Bean, the director of Haversham Manor, he’s full of flamboyantly delighted self-regard — and, when Bean is playing Inspector Carter, Navratil does a superb job of walking the tightrope between the duelling realities of the inspector, and the ever-more-crazed actor/director inside him.
James Barclay also impressed me mightily in a trio of roles. For starters, he plays the actor Max, who’s playing Cecil. Cecil is having an affair with Florence and that actor, Sandra, desperately want to kiss Max — but Max is gay. Barclay plays this without resorting to stereotype — he’s just sincerely horrified, which makes the situation exponentially funnier — and he expresses his distaste with a hilariously eccentric gesture, spitting out his tongue. The last time I saw that was when my dog picked up a ball that he’d pooed on.
Director Tracy Labrosse deserves a huge amount of credit for the overall consistency of this production. To succeed, farce needs to deliver regular comic hits and escalate in extremity: this script delivers on both fronts and, thanks to Labrosse and her crew, so does this production. With actor and co-producer Barclay, Labrosse designed the appropriately amateur-looking set, which does a fine job of meeting the script’s technical demands. And, clearly no slacker, Labrosse is also performing as Florence, with perfect timing and a spot-on sense of the character’s femme melodrama.
Without giving too much away, another character is also called upon to play Florence. Thanks to Rebecca Wass’s performance, it’s a joy to watch that character morph from terrified conscript to confident — and virtually murderous — diva.
There’s also more-than-solid work from Christopher Dellinger (Thomas), Nick Palidwor (Charles), and Trevor Roberts (Perkins).
I approached this production with some trepidation, but I ended up riding the waves of laughter that were rolling through the theatre — and through me. There were a couple of folks behind me who were helpless. Gone. (When I also think the show’s funny) I love that.
THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG by Henry Lewis, Henry Shields, and Jonathan Sayer. Directed by Tracy Labrosse. A Black Box Theatre Co. production at the Waterfront Theatre until August 30. Tickets and information
PHOTO CREDIT: Photo of Jordon Navratil and Rebecca Wass by Dominique Labrosse.
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