Where can you see near-professional caliber amateur American actors playing amateurish professional British actors playing insipid British provincials in a British sex farce? This dizzyingly complicated conundrum has a two-word answer: Theatre-Intime.
Michael Frayn's uproarious "Noises Off" — a mind-bending, meta-theatrical comedy that follows the onand off-stage antics of a touring company — won Best Play awards on both sides of the Atlantic when it opened in 1982. It has been among the most popular and most often-produced comedies of the last two decades. And it was adapted into a 1992 film starring Christopher Reeve.
All this is not to say that Intime's choice of play is hackneyed, but rather that some aesthetic efforts entertain, amuse and confound no matter how often they are experienced.
While the "play-within-a-play" premise of "Noises Off" recalls a recent barrage of Hollywood meta-films such as "The Truman Show" and "Scary Movie," the play neither indulges in the existential questions that arise in self-referential art, nor degenerates into artless teenage scatology. "Noises Off" is like some elaborate and teasing foreplay, well-timed and ripe with double entendre.
Act I follows a collection of theatrical hacks and has-beens as they frantically struggle to master the blocking and dialogue of a comic sex play called "Nothing On," in which two couples arrange simultaneous trysts in the country home of Philip and Flavia Brent (Adam Friedman '01 and Lindsay Garrenton '01). The plot line also involves a bungling burglar (Cliff Sofield '02), an overworked stage manager (Matt Roman '03) and some perturbation about an unpaid Value Added Tax.
Initially, audience members are not clued in to the fact that they are watching a play being rehearsed, not performed. Playing Dotty Otley playing Mrs. Clackett, Devin Sidell '02 heightens the audience's confusion by shifting mid-line from an unintelligible Yorkshire to a snooty East End accent. When Sidell breaks out of one part and into another, lightening her accent and conversing with the off-stage voice of the director, Lloyd Dallas '67 (played by Kurt Uy '01), the audience cannot help but do a double take. Sidell's transformation begins the play's descent into the actor's nightmare — and audience's farcical delight — that is the production of "Nothing On."
The players and the players they are playing are not characters but caricatures. The cast uniformly achieves the kind of inflated over-acting and slapstick precision necessary to keep up with the grueling pace of "Noises Off." Comically, Tommy Dewey '01, as Garry Lejeune, remembers his lines as Roger Tramplemain for "Nothing On," but he can never complete a thought as Lejeune. His speech is littered with "you know's" and sentences that stop abruptly and resume only with a pleading gesticulation or a grin. Lejeune is besotted with Dotty Otley, an actress twice his age and the jaded "Grand Dame" of the production.
Ali Freda '02, as the dim-witted, Yoga-practicing ingenue Brooke Ashton, is clad in nothing but a black garter belt, panties and a bra. Though the script doesn't demand such explicitly sexy attire, this reviewer, after taxing the full faculties of his imagination, can offer no complaints. What appears to be a shameless attempt at selling sex — of using Freda's obvious beauty to get Princeton's legions of sexually frustrated men to shell out for tickets — is, in fact, just that.
This would be somewhat patronizing had Freda not carried off her role with a breathless ease and naive liveliness that her limited acting experience would seem to preclude. Though her accent wavers peculiarly between English and French, Freda makes Brooke seem to be exactly the kind of wide-eyed, vacuous girl who would make regular use of lingerie. Wide-eyed also describes Poppy Norton-Taylor (Sarah Curran '02), the assistant stage manager of "Nothing On," and Dallas' sometimes love interest.
Act II of "Noises Off" is listed on the program as a second Act I because it is a backstage perspective on the same act of "Nothing On" — only at a later date in the tour's schedule. The stage lights dim, and the Brent's country home (designed by Allie Tepper '01) pivots 180 degrees to reveal wooden scaffolding and cue lines written in permanent marker above windows and doors.
The audience sees the bare-bones carpentry that facilitates the illusion of theater, and, appropriately, it is this act that exposes the actors' frustrated, raw and openly hostile relationships. This act is perhaps the high point of the entire show, when the audience witnesses the full theatrical and aerobic acumen of the ensemble cast.
"Noises Off" — along with "Nothing On" as well — ends with a tip of the cap to high comic style: a wedding. Fittingly, this is no walk-down-the-aisle-to-Pachabel's-Canon affair, but rather a drunken orgy of chaos and discontent, a marriage, at last, of the onand off-stage dimensions of the play. With "Noises Off," Director Kate Callahan '01 has achieved an uproarious bit of weekend humor, fit for a date or an outing with your "mates."
Theatre-Intime presents "Noises Off." Tonight through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m. Call (609)-258-4950 for reservations.
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