STAGE WEST: "Noises Off" at Old Globe Theatre

The cast of "Nothing On" has something crazy going in "Noises Off."                  Photo by Rich Soublet II

            For maximum appreciation and enjoyment of “Noises Off” one must make a friend of mayhem. That is this longstanding British farce’s stock-in-trade.
            Doors fly open, then slam. Slam, then fly open. Stairs are seemingly made for galloping up or tumbling down. Projectiles fly. Wardrobes malfunction. Props are fumbled and abused. Cast members incur more comic physical punishment than in a “3 Stooges” marathon.
            But Michael Frayn’s wild classic about actors (plus a very beleaguered director and two very harried stage managers) putting on a show called “Nothing On” is not lowbrow entertainment. His script calls for exhaustive pratfalling and some definite mugging, but it is a clever one with a good deal of witty banter – provided you can hear it over an audience that, guaranteed, will be howling. Especially by Act 3 when the whole shebang goes full-on chaotic.
            It takes a director as experienced with farce as is Gordon Greenberg to instill just enough order and cohesion into “Noises Off” that it doesn’t fly completely off the rails. Greenberg’s resume at the Old Globe, where “Noises Off” opened on Friday night, has been burnished by “Crime and Punishment, A Comedy” and “Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors,” both staged in the Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White theater-in-the-round. His instincts are therefore impeccable.
            “Nothing On,” on the other hand, has a director named Lloyd Dallas (James Waterston)  who may know what he’s doing, but the odds, the fates and circumstances out of his control are against him.
            Many if not most theatergoers have seen “Noises Off” at least once by now; it premiered in 1982. It was last seen locally at Lamb’s Players Theatre in 2018 with Robert Smyth directing. Besides its sheer wackiness the show is notable for its stagecraft – Act One takes place in an English theater where “Nothing On” is being rehearsed; for Act Two, the set is turned completely around and the audience sees a performance coming-undone from a backtsage view; the front view is restored for Act Three when another performance, deteriorating at a faster clip even than in the previous act, is happening.
            Scenic designer Todd Rosenthal created for Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago the depiction of a two-story country home owned by the fictitious Brents; the Globe’s set is a slight modification of that, and it works like a charm.
            So does the cast of nine, headlined by the stupendous Jefferson Mays. An actor of pretty much matchless energy, ingenuity and comedic instincts, his blood-phobic Frederick Fellowes is worth the price of a ticket. Watch him, trousers around his ankles, hop one step at a time from ground floor to second. Watch him keel over with abandon. Listen to him earnestly attempting to bring a measure of sanity to the proceedings – naturally in vain.
            Second in sight-gag heaven to Mays’ hop up the stairs is Michelle Veintimilla’s crawl down them in her underthings – she’s portraying a nearsighted starlet, Brooke Ashton, who’s lost her contact lenses.
            The play-within-a-play ensemble also features Linda Mugleston as Dotty Otley, who keeps forgetting her lines. (She does remember to shout “sardines” about a hundred times); Nehal Joshi as vaguely leading-man-ish Garry Lejeune; Orville Mendoza as a sot playing a burglar; and Bryonha Marie, calling all her fellow actors “love” and doing the best of the improvising when “Nothing On” collapses. Abby Leigh Huffstetler and Matthew Patrick Davis are the stage managers tasked along with their director to manage the unmanageable.
            Everyone’s dressed, or undressed, with elan by costume designer Izumi Inaba; Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbaum should be applauded for coordinating the “Noises Off” stunts, as should voice and dialect coach Lauren Lovett for the veddy prop-uh British accents some cast members demonstrate.
            All this said, two and a half hours of “Noises Off,” or “Nothing On,” is more than I genuinely require for amusement. I could probably watch Jefferson Mays onstage for twice that long and not feel a bit antsy, but slapstick farce in general only goes so far with me. I must be in the minority because at the performance I attended audience members around me laughed even harder the longer the show went.
            To get into the spirit of the script, I’ll say that I shant quibble. We need the laughter right now when so much of the real noise around us is frightening and negative. As the playwright Frayn wrote: “I haven’t come to the theater to hear about other people’s problems. I’ve come to be taken out of myself, and, preferably, not put back again.”
            “Noises Off” runs through Aug. 10 at the Old Globe in Balboa Park.