Civic's 'Noises Off' Aims For A Well-Timed Good Time
Civic's 'Noises Off' aims for a well-timed good time
By CHRISTOPHER POTTER
NEWS ARTS WRITER
Sometimes one has to be terrifically good in order to look bad.
Case in point: "Noises Off," one of the funniest and most physically intricate plays ever.
Opening Wednesday, the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre production of Michael Fryan’s 1982 comedy shifts its setting from the English hinterlands to the Chicago suburbs. Intact is Fryan’s meticulous and merciless chronicle of a third-rate theater company's collapse into riotous anarchy onstage and off.
Says director Thom Johnson, “We’ve set it in Chicago because I wanted to get a contrast of accents, with the company members speaking British while rehearsing and performing scenes (for the play-within-a-play), and otherwise talking in Midwestern accents.
Johnson says he sees some “very humorous possibilities" in the shifting accents, and in the notion of one of those “always-struggling Chicago stage troupes doing a show out in the suburbs.”
Fryan’s classic comedy hardly needs much sweetening. Act I finds director Lloyd Dallas (played by Larry Rusinsky) and his Otstar Productions players busily rehearsing a British-penned sex farce, “Nothing On." Fryan's celebrated Act II depicts the play in performance as viewed from back-stage facing front by panicked, feuding actors and crew members.
Act III offers an audience-eye view of "Nothing On” - now in total ruin. Actors deliberately sabotage others’ entrances, whole swaths of dialogue are forgotten, overt physical violence erupts among the raging, soon-to-be-out-of-work actors.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a play like it,” says Johnson. “Probably the Marx Brothers movies are the closest you could come. I think what I like most is the old-time slapstick quality of it. There’s so much action involved and so much timing, it's the ultimate physical ensemble piece.
"One thing we discovered very quickly in the rehearsal process is that if anybody’s missing, it almost negated the ability to rehearse at all. In ‘Noises Off,’ the old saying ‘There are no small parts’ is true.
“It’s like playing without your second baseman. If someone’s not there, then flowers don’t get onstage, fire axes don’t get handed to the right people, and plates of sardines (a crucial prop in "Nothing On”) don’t get where they’re going.”
Act II is a virtual ballet of offstage synchronicity. “You have to create (the illusion of) chaos, and that’s not easy” says Johnson. “It really is a dance, and if just a single element of timing is off, then what's supposed to go wrong may not go wrong.
“I think even if people have seen the show before, they’ll be intrigued enough to come back and see if another group can make it work,” he adds. “Maybe everything really will fall apart.”
Johnson’s cast includes Kyle Marie as leading lady (and alcoholic) Dotty Otley, David Andrews as lecherous actor Frederick Fellowes, Steve Ryder as aging thespian Selsdon Mowbray, Bethany Rae Veltman as bombshell bimbo Brooke Ashton, Scott Mancha as swishy yet hetero Garry Le-Jeune, Carla Milarch as practical Belinda Blair, Jeanne B. Hicks-Caselli as assistant stage manager Poppy Norton Taylor, and Jim Knapp Jr. as tech man Tim Allgood.
“It’s been a lot of fun,” says Johnson. “In fact, it’s been a problem that we’re still breaking one another up (in laughter). We know all the lines, we know all the physical bits, but some things just strike you as funny over and over again.”
The large playing space at the Civic PlayHouse has proved an asset to building the country house set for the comedy’s play-within-a-play. The entire set must be revolved 180 degrees during the show’s two intermissions. Says set designer Barb Wells, “The stage here is 42 feet wide, as opposed to 30 feet at Lydia Mendelssohn (Theater, where the AACT production originally was to have run). So it fits easily.”
Asked about the theory voiced from time to time that “Noises Off’ is a comic allegory for the fall of Great Britain, Johnson merely grins. “We’re calling this show ‘The Play that Asks You Not to Think,’ ” he says. “You’re just here to have a good time. If you try to find some meaning in this, you’re evening will be misspent."
"Noises Off" runs Wednesdays-Saturdays through July 6 at Civic’s PlayHouse, 2275 Platt Road. Curtain is 8 p.m. nightly, with an additional 2 p.m. matinee Saturdays. (And yes, there will be a performance July 4.) For tickets and information, call 971-0605.
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