Theatre: Prop(er) Comedy

 The Play That Goes Wrong by Henry Lewis, Henry Shields, and Jonathan Sayer, directed by Damaso Rodriquez, Seattle Rep through 28 September.

Many years ago, in the pre-Covid times, I went to London on business for Amazon. And I has a free day and wandered the city, primarily hunting out bookstores. And there was a kiosk with plays currently running in the East End. One was the Cursed Child Harry Potter play, but the one that caught my eye was The Play That Goes Wrong. In the end, I decided to hunt down bookstores, but I always wondered about it.

Well, at last that particular crow comes home to roost with the Seattle Repertory opening their season with their production of the play. It is light. It is frothy. and it is hilarious.

People in theatre love plays about theatre, and anyone with more than a tacit background in theatre recognizes everything that go wrong in a performance. Muffed lines, mis-pronunciations, missed cues, malfunctioning props. And here everything that can go wrong does go wrong, in a non-stop cavalcade of blunders, malaprops, and accidents. The action and errors come in hard and fast here, and the audience (which included more than the normal amount of kids this time) rolled with it.

The concept is that the Comley Polytechnic Drama Society is staging a production of The Murder at Haversham Hall, a 1920s mystery. The Drama Society a small but spunky group of amateur thespians, and their reach exceeds their grasp. Combined with a deathtrap of a stage, the groundwork is laid for continual challenges to the production. The actors (Cassi Q. Kohl, Chip Sherman (previous in Fat Ham), Darius Pierce, Ian Bond, Setareki, Darragh Kennan (early in a Sherlock Holmes play at the Rep), Chis Murray, and Ashly Song) are all very good with verbal and physical humor, which they need to be, as the ongoing disasters pitch them from one side of the stage to the other, and leaves everything in shambles.

The Rep has always been an organization that excels at their technical production, and the company does not disappoint in making a play where the technical issues threaten to consume the staff. Sound cues go off at the wrong time, doors refuse to function properly, props fall from the walls, people miss their marks, but through it all the players manage to push forward in that "Show Must Go On", straining to maintain the lines they have to speak and the reality of the stage grows weirder and weirder.  It was a lot of fun.

We had out own bit of minor challenges as well. We initially sat in the wrong aisle (hey, it was the first show of the season), and left a half-consumed bottle of modestly expensive wine behind at dinner (I ended up walking four blocks back to retrieve it, and the staff at Toulouse Petit Kitchen were more than kind in finding it). And I was intent on finding the Lovely Bride's late mother's seat in the theater. After her passing, we sponsored a seat in the theater for Nardi Novak, who was in a couple movies and TV shows as we as being active in the Pittsburgh theater scene. I tried to find the seat location before the show, but the info desk had no clue, but said they would look it up for the Intermission. Low and behold, at Intermission, they came up with the seat number, CC12 on the balcony level (On the far left as you face it from the stage). I had to politely ask the occupant of that seat to vacant temporarily as I got this shot, and scurried back to my seat for the curtain of the second act. 

Anyway, 

The Play That Goes Wrong does everything right, and is a very pleasant way of spending a Sunday afternoon. Yeah, the Rep will delve back into more serious matter, but this was a delight.

More later,