Clockwise from lower left, Lenne Klingaman, Deborah Strang, Geoff Elliott, Stephen Rockwell, Jill Hill / Craig Schwartz
Something On
Michael Frayn’s Noises Off has found a home at A Noise Within. While the 17-year-old company has given the 17-year-old comedy a well-paced turn, thanks in great part to a cast that turns characters into people, the farce-within-a-farce gets an assist from the house. Once again the cramped old hall is the “tenth player on the field,” confining the set-within-the-set to appropriately modest scale and heightening the onstage lunacy with an air of long-term survival that assures "this too shall pass."
A Noise Within takes theater tradition seriously. It still maintains an unwieldy repertory schedule (three concurrent productions in rotation) and a steady acting company to perform it. Although honoring the commitment to an acting company can undermine precision casting, it creates connections between actors, and that is one of the intangibles behind the success of this Noises Off.
Director Geoff Elliott, the company co-founder and co-artistic director who is directing three of this season’s six productions, takes on a fourth assignment by playing Lloyd Dallas, the womanizing director of Nothing On, the play-within-the-play. An artistic director brings a seasoned temperment to the role of a director – of and in a production. And, having lived through his share of real-life stage calamities informs Elliott’s Dallas with the perfect droll deadpan upon which the actors’ mounting hysteria becomes all the more hysterical.
Over three acts, Frayn's staple of commercial and community stages follows an English troupe as they careen from disastrous final dress rehearsal through two performances on their tour: one, days after opening, and the other days before the end of the run. Elliott has the action working both ways. Though most of the humor springs from things going haywire, there also are times where the farce is working according to the script-within-the-script. Along the way, his actors continually earn bigger laughs by seeming to want to avoid errors, rather than relying on them.
Each act of Noises Off is a different performance of Act I of Nothing On, a standard British sex farce that is touring the English Midlands. The action takes place in the main room of a home whose owners are on holiday in Spain (in part to avoid the tax authorities). The home is in the care of their housekeeper and a real estate agent hired to find renters. First, however, he’ll use it for an afternoon tryst with a lady from the Inland Revenue. Unfortunately, it’s the same day the owners sneak back home. It's also the day a daft old burglar, thinking the place is empty, breaks in. Through a series of perfectly timed entrances and exits, through a half-dozen doors around the set, they all manage to avoid each other for most of the act.
Dallas is aided by two young stage managers, Tim (Shaun Anthony) and Poppy (Lenne Klingaman). Stephen Rockwell and Jill Hill play Frederick Fellowes and Belinda Blair, the actors cast as the homeowners. Deborah Strang plays Dotty Otley, the actress playing the housekeeper. Apollo Dukakis plays Selsdon Mowbray, the old actor playing the old burglar. And Mikael Salazar and Emily Kosloski are the real estate and revenue agents, respectively.
Special appreciation must be given to Salazar, who gives a detailed performance of a man gradually coming unraveled. His Garry Lejeune seems a competent actor – unlike Dotty or Frederick. Instead, his problem is jealous rage prompted by a questionable backstage romance. It is a performance as incendiary as it is controlled, and it has been allowed to stand out as this production's emotional high-end against which the others can differentiate. Regulars like Hill, Strang, Dukakis and Rockwell, now with Klingaman (a fine Anne in the currently running Richard III) and Anthony, lay the groundwork for debuting Kosloski (one of Joan Rivers’ aides in her recent Geffen premiere) and Salazar (returning after Arms and the Man a couple years back).
Elliott has a fine design team in Adam Lillibridge (set), Soojin Lee (costumes), Ken Booth (lights) and Patrick Hotchkiss (sound). The play runs in rep with Richard and an adaptation of Crime and Punishment through December 19.
