Amateurish performances and hammy actors. Missed cues and flubbed lines. Missing props and dangerous sets. An overenthusiastic stage manager and a distracted stage operator. The Play That Goes Wrong is an utter failure and a must-see farce. Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields’ Olivier Award-winning play for Best New Comedy in 2015 is now at the Kennedy Center in an uproarious touring production that is brilliantly conceived and nimbly performed. Production director Matt DiCarlo embraces the chaos and beautifully choreographs this hot mess.
It’s not a new formula to stage a play-within-a-play that goes wrong. Wiliam Shakespeare does it a few times: in Hamlet, “The Mousetrap” (aka “The Murder of Gonzago”) fails to elicit a guilty plea from Claudius; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Nick Bottom and friends bowdlerize the Greek tragedy “Pyramus and Thisbe,” evoking tears of laughter rather than sadness. More recent antecedents include Rupert Holmes, Fred Ebb, and John Cander’s Curtains—a musical about backstage murders and the detective who imagines himself an actor; Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor—a comedy about the opera, mistaken identities, and a plethora of singers dressed like the murderous clown Pagliacci; and Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, which follows backstage affairs and rivalries between cast members that spill into their antics onstage. So what if it’s a familiar trope? The Play That Goes Wrong belongs as a canonical member of this genre designed especially for theater geeks.
The Play That Goes Wrong plays with the concept of the fourth wall and metatheatricality like a cat toying with a dead mouse. Before the play even begins, we see lighting and sound operator Trevor Watson (Akron Watson) futzing at his control panel plastered with Duran Duran posters and stage manager Annie Twilloil (Kai Heath) aligning the last of the props. An audience member is brought onstage to secure a falling fireplace mantel until it can be secured with gaffer tape. The director, who also plays the lead role of Inspector Carver, Chris Bean (Matt Harrington) introduces the play for his “die-WRECK-tour-ee-uhl de-BOO” and chides the audience several times—notably, for breaking the fourth wall to help him find a missing prop. The program, too, offers this metatheatrical entry point with bios and theater adverts for the fictional production of The Murder at Haversham Manor, and a welcome letter from the above director that quite literally gives away the play’s ending.
The Murder at Haversham is a hackneyed story, lightly parodying both the West End’s longest running show, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, and our insatiable desire for BritBox murder mysteries set in crumbling country manors. A rich young man is murdered on the eve of his engagement party and all in attendance—the philandering flapper fiancee, the jealous younger brother, the best friend with money problems, and the butler—are suspects being grilled by the local inspector.
There has never been a better argument for the rampant defunding of university drama departments across the country than in the caliber of work produced by the play’s company, the Cornley University Drama Society. Each actor in The Play brilliantly embodies terrible actor archetypes while also portraying tired British murder mystery stock characters. It’s hard work for good actors to give such purposely terrible performances.
There is the vampy ingenue Sandra Wilkinson as Florence Colleymoore (Mara Davi), who poses, pouts, struts, and always finds her best angle—even after being concussed several times. The failed athlete Dennis Tyde (Bartley Booz) playing the loyal butler struggles with polysyllabic words, often pronouncing them phonetically. Quite omni-noose, indeed! The model turned actor Jonathan Harris (Joseph Anthony Byrd) is an ambulatory and abused corpse as the murdered Charles Haversham—stepped on, dropped, spit upon, and more, until he inchworms his deceased form offstage. And Alex Mandell steals scenes as rich boy actor Max Bennett playing the preppy cad Cecil Haversham. After a positive audience response in his first scene, he camps it up every time he can, often bowing mid-sentence when the audience applauds his clownish behavior. The bombastic actor Robert Grove (Peyton Grove), with his Orson Welles baritone and commanding frame as Thomas Colleymoore, and Harrington as the do-it-all director (voice and dialect coach, fight choreographer, casting director, and costume designer) round out the cast. After the sole woman actor is knocked out cold, stage manager Annie slides into a red dress with script-in-hand to play Florence, leading to an All About Eve subplot as the understudy is unwilling to cede her part. Some know their lines, some know their blocking, and all have a lot of verve and too much projection, but none have it all down pat yet. This leads to repeated scenes, false entrances, missed exits, many blackouts, and the imbibing of paint thinner.
The platitudinous dialogue, stale plotlines, incompetent but indefatigable actors, and stock characters are no match for the set itself, which is truly the antagonist of the play. Nigel Hook’s set unsurprisingly received both a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for its ingenious design. A grand Edwardian parlor—with chandeliers, green velvet fainting couch, portraits of the family spaniel and coat of arms, and a roaring fireplace—becomes a death trap. Doors do not open or do not stay closed, the elevator smokes, and all props are misplaced or misused. Unconscious actors are hidden in grandfather clocks or removed through windows, and actors must often perform their scenes while holding up falling wall ornaments. Like Anton Chekhov’s gun, which must be fired if mentioned, it’s apparent that the perilously placed balcony study is not long for this world, and the stunning denouement is an allusion to a great Buster Keaton cinematic moment. The physicality of the ensemble in working with this stage set cannot be overstated; it’s a beautiful ballet of falling beams and beaned actors.
If there is any fault in this production, it may be that the sustained audience laughter competes with the action onstage. The cast often has to shout their lines to drown out the stage crumbling and bursting into flames about them. But the play is not so much a whodunit as a whocareswhodidit? It’s about the joy of watching a play done poorly. Simply put, The Play That Goes Wrong gets it really right.
Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields’ The Play That Goes Wrong, directed by Matt DiCarlo, runs through Aug. 13 at the Kennedy Center. kennedy-center.org. $39–$159.