Noises Off Was Mostly Off for Me at Ja’Duke
Ja’Duke’s theater is a perfect place to spend a few hours of an October Sunday, despite the rain that didn’t come. Their latest is Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, which is a play about a play—an intentionally chaotic farce that follows a hapless and kind of pathetic theater troupe attempting to stage a British sex comedy called Nothing On. Sometimes, when you hear the word ‘farce’ you know it might not hit the mark. And to me, this one fell flat.
The show unfolds in three acts, each revisiting the same scene from different angles: a disastrous tech rehearsal, a backstage view mid-run, and a final performance where everything unravels. One effect that I admired was the set, which was built with two sides, they swing it around between acts to show the back, where the actors enter. It’s like seeing the back of a famous painting, something you don’t often get to see.
I found myself confused, unsure why they said that, and on unsure footing throughout the long show. It’s three acts, and felt like the jokes were topical and perhaps too inside-theater baseball.
The cast of characters includes Dotty, (Becca Greene-Van Horne) the forgetful leading lady; Garry, (Jerry Greene) her jealous scene partner; Brooke, (Emily Welcome) a self-absorbed ingénue; Frederick, (Jonathan Dias) a nervous actor prone to nosebleeds; Belinda, (Jessica Knox), the cheerful gossip; Selsdon, (F. Reed Brown), the hard-of-hearing drunk; and Lloyd, (Ryn Griffith) the sarcastic director juggling romantic entanglements with both Brooke and the frazzled stage manager, Poppy (Helen Woods-Blake).
The humor hinges on missed cues, slamming doors, and physical comedy—but for those unfamiliar with farce, the plot can feel repetitive and hard to follow. The two-level, two-sided set by Dave Galbraith, Dylan Vinton, and Nick Waynelovich gave the actors plenty of room to run upstairs frantically, bang around the doors, and perform some skilled physical comedy, especially Garry, who sets the frenetic tone and never lets up.
Kudos too to young Brooke, Emily Welcome, who fills her role with fun as the young self-absorbed ingenue, as she struts the stage with nonchalance in her fashionable lingerie. It’s jarring at first when we hear the director hollering directions and interrupting the actors on stage, but we get used to this in-and-out routine as the play runs through the same script at three different London theaters.
Noises Off was written in 1982, but it isn’t at all topical or dated, much like the farce it is. The audience didn’t mind the confusion and laughed heartily as the play unfolded. This is a high-energy play, and you might understand the whole plot, but for me, it was too hard.
Noises Off continues on October 17, 18, and 19 at the Ja’Duke Theater, located on Industrial Parkway in Turners Falls. Tickets here.