The entire premise of the theatrical arts is pretty silly when you take a step back from it: grown-ups pretending to be people they’re not, playing make believe for the amusement of other grown-ups, who watch in judgment. Such is the premise of Noises Off, the delightfully meta, classic comedy now playing at the Keegan Theatre. In this tale, a group of actors rehearse and then twice perform a fictional play to increasingly disastrous ends. Along the way, they turn the play inside out, showing the seams, and eventually tear the whole thing to shreds. If A Chorus Line forces the audience to confront and sympathize with actors and bit players as full humans with their own complex inner workings and backstories, Noises Off avers that those actors are full humans, sure, as deeply flawed and absurd as anyone else.
The play opens on a dress rehearsal of the play within the play, Nothing On, a fluffy sex farce featuring a never-ending series of misunderstandings, characters narrowly missing bumping into each other, and people forced to run about in their knickers. The cast is having a very rough time remembering their lines and complicated blocking, and the director (Jared H. Graham) is at his wit’s end from where he sits in the audience. Watching the fictional rehearsal start and stop and repeating certain segments, the audience becomes acutely aware of the real-life rehearsals that had to have preceded this performance (hopefully with fewer calamities).
With each act, more is revealed as the backstage drama and mishaps pile up. Ryan Sellers as leading man Garry LeJeune keeps his barely suppressed rage simmering all through the first act before it hilariously boils over in the second. He’s having a secret fling with Dotty Otley (Susan Marie Rhea), an emotional woman who easily falls to pieces. Veteran actor Selsdon (Timothy H. Lynch) must be kept away from alcohol at all costs, but the other actors keep passing around bottles of booze. The resident bimbo, Brooke (Brigid Wallace Harper), can’t stop losing her contact lenses or doing dynamic movement exercises, and she’s a kick to watch. Valerie Adams Rigsbee has a tricky role to play as Belinda Blair, who is both the company’s peacekeeper and biggest pot-stirrer, but she serves as a bit of a counterweight to the bedlam on set. And if all that wasn’t enough chaos, nobody can keep track of the many plates of sardines populating the set.
After the first act, Matthew J. Keenan’s ingeniously designed set rotates around to show a performance a few months later from “backstage,” before rotating back around to watch a performance that completely implodes for the third act. It’s a dizzying choreography with incredibly complicated blocking, and it’s impossible not to think of the cacophony of cues the actors behind the actors must remember, not to mention they often have to do different things on the same cues in each of the three acts.
Noises Off, which premiered in 1982, has often been hailed as one of the funniest stage comedies of all time, and with Keegan’s production it’s easy to see why its appeal has endured. Visual gags and puns can sometimes be spotted from a mile away, but the impeccable comedic timing, physicality, and commitment of the cast make the punch lines land perfectly. The setting for both the play within the play and Noises Off is England, and the cast admirably navigates the accent work in both modes, making it all the funnier when they slip between believable British accents and “oi, guvnah” style line readings. Isn’t it absurd for people to gather in a room together watching a silly wild goose chase, and isn’t it neat to do so?
