As the audience settles in, there’s trouble on the set. The stage manager runs out of time to attach the manor’s mantelpiece and must dash backstage. Ready or not, the show must go on. That principle permeates The Play That Goes Wrong, a veritable (and thick!) encyclopedia of theatrical mishaps.
Chuckles begin as soon as the audience realizes it’s safe to laugh at the hapless amateur acting troupe struggling to perform a stilted murder mystery while negotiating snags that begin with a sticking door and show no sign of ending.
It’s a dynamo of a farce, spewing gags like a spinning turbine. The popular 2012 play, still running in London, was written by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields to exploit the lovely terror of covering problems in live performance. Vermont Stage has assembled the eight-member cast and hazard-packed set. All the characters need is someone to laugh at them.
The fictional performers are members of the Cornley Drama Society, dedicated amateurs all. The stage manager and light/sound techie are seen a little more often than such backstage roles normally allow, but emergencies arise. The other six take up the parts in a creaky, mannered mystery. We have a stiff butler, an overwrought leading lady, a raffish leading man, a blowhard best friend, a police inspector and a corpse. And we have a stage set filled with hidden perils; keep your eye on the chancy second floor.
We’re all in this together as the characters face calamities no actor can hide from a spectator. Every play draws on the audience’s suspension of disbelief, but the Cornley players keep reminding us of our deal with endless lost props and mistimed entrances. The counterweight is the zeal of the characters to carry on. They’ll drink paint thinner to sustain an illusion, ignore a disintegrating set to finish a line and pantomime a sword fight with sound effects when their weapons fail them. Their commitment so exceeds their acting talent that we’re watching the pure human desire to please an audience.
Each new crisis demands that the actors wordlessly agree on a solution. It’s as exhilarating as improv, but here the fixes tend to backfire: When has hiding in a grandfather clock ever worked?
Portraying feelings you don’t have can make acting fun, but there are limits. The script has the vampy leading lady and the dead man’s debonair brother squealing about how they yearn to kiss, but the actors are always spared a lusty smooch by another character’s entrance. Thank goodness — the actors are repelled by each other. But in a later scene, when no one opens the door to interrupt them, their lines don’t leave much room to temporize. Proclaiming how much they want something while squirming to avoid it is pure silliness.
Director Candy Padula steers fine actors into becoming wooden thespians, emoting with their hands and facing the audience to be sure no hammy flourish is lost. It’s first-class farce, for a lot of craft goes into producing a portrait of an ingenue who seems to be perpetually auditioning or a detective stuck on a treadmill of exposition. Bad acting is an art in itself.
Jordan Gullikson conjures an actor pretentious enough to create his own posh-y accent, but what come out of the inspector’s mouth are excruciating extra syllables. William Wilder launches the show by failing to get into position as a corpse during the blackout. We see him scamper for the chaise on which to become inert, and it will not be the last time the dead man has to move.
Abby Maurice neatly handles both the leading lady’s exaggerated flounces and some stupendous slapstick. Ry Poulin plays her lover, but he only has eyes for the audience, forever peeking at them as he yearns for applause.
Sarah Mell portrays the butler with a firm bearing and a deadly determination to say all his lines, even when he draws his fellow actors into theater’s black hole by repeating (and repeating) a circular bit of dialogue. Jon van Luling sports a fine mustache as an aristo whose majesty begins and ends with layers of tweed.
As the stage manager, Catherine Grace revs her screw gun confidently but is all nerves when she must fill in for the leading lady. Then the thrill of charming an audience snares her in theater’s clutches. Vermont Stage even duplicated a plot point when the company’s actual assistant stage manager had to take on the role of the techie at Wednesday night’s show. Timothy Sheridan was as well rehearsed and funny as the varsity players.
Padula has drilled the team to deliver all the physical bits with precision, so every mistake lands in the bull’s-eye. Then she relies on the set itself to contribute a special kind of chaos. Designed by the director’s husband, Chuck Padula, it’s the essence of stagecraft: ambitious in superficial grandeur and flimsy in execution. Naturally, every moving piece is poised to break, but you’ll never guess how or when.
Costume designer Sarah Sophia Lidz follows the play’s more-is-more credo, piling on the patrician patterns and bright colors. The leading lady’s red dress might be the least subtle gown ever worn in a manor house, and the dead man’s gold and black suit is almost loud enough to bring him back to life.
The Play That Goes Wrong is nonstop comedy, running from satirical highs to dumb joke lows. This production does all the gags justice, though it never quite feels like the performers have lost the reins to a runaway carriage. Too often, the director freezes some players while hauling our attention over to another caper.
But, if the production is a little too much in control to flabbergast us, the sure-footed comedy is plentiful. These spirited performers know how to turn their disasters into our entertainment.