Laughing Stock
Three stars$24. Through May 29. Murray Theatre, Ruth Eckerd Hall, 1111 N. McMullen Booth Rd., Clearwater. 727-791-7400. facebook.com/HatTrickTheatre. Thurs.-Sat., 7:30 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.
At its best, Hat Trick Theatre’s Laughing Stock is a hilarious farce about the world of the theater and all the things that can go wrong in any given production. At its worst, the play is an only mildly amusing victim of its own uneven casting and erratic direction. But if you’re willing to take the bad with the good — which means, if you’re willing to sit through the intermittently interesting Act One — you’ll eventually get to an act which will have you laughing till you cry. Is it worth the wait? I de nitely think so. There are moments in Act Two of this surprising com- edy that are sensationally funny, side-splittingly funny, and I so much value such moments, I’d sit through Cats (ugh) to get there. Add the serious subtext — about the perils of the American stage business — and there’s more reason than not to head to the Murray Theatre. OK, the experience is imperfect. But when it works, it’s delirious.
The comedy is set at a New Hampshire summer stock theater called The Playhouse, where artistic director Gordon Page (the convincingly sincere Stephen Fischer) is preparing to produce three plays in repertory: King Lear, Dracula, and the British farce Charley’s Aunt. As we proceed through auditions and rehearsals, everything that could possibly go wrong, does. For example, the theater’s essential benefactress refuses to fund Lear and insists on Hamlet; the director of Charley’s Aunt (the excellent Emily Belvo) decides the play's not a farce but a meditation on “the anguish of gender”; an actress (charming Kara Goldberg) so sexualizes her audition she threatens to turn the theater into a strip club; and a key actor (likable Ryan Bernier) announces that he’s giving up the stage for law school.
These are just a few of the problems author Charles Morey has put in the way of his show’s many characters (14!), but they don’t really prepare us for the debacle of the stupendously funny second act, in which we actually see one-and-a-fraction of the plays in repertory. I don’t want to spoil your fun, so I’ll just mention that Dracula’s cape gets stuck in a door when he’s supposed to be stalking his latest victim; an actor from Charley’s Aunt gets confused and serves tea just when the Head Vampire is looking for blood; and the sound designer repeatedly has dogs wailing whenever a character remarks on the utter silence. There are at least 20 more gaffes, each one funnier than the last, and I simply have to add, watch out for that mechanical bat the Impaler’s supposed to turn into. I should also add that every one of these disasters could credibly happen in a real production. (If you’ve ever worked in the theater, you’ve seen your share of such mishaps. It’s just unlikely that so many of them would occur in one evening.) We also see bits of Hamlet — through a scrim, as if we’re backstage — and the highlight here is the disappearance of Yorick’s skull. But even this briefl y glimpsed contretemps seems anticlimactic after the great fun of Dracula, and I wonder if Laughing Stock might not have been better without it. There are some things I’d never cut, though: The “morphing” of the Dracula character (Paul McColgan) from bat to human, and, back in Act One, an angry speech by the performer Vernon Volker (Dan Granke) about why perfectly good actors end up in New Hampshire doing summer stock. This cri de coeur about the crushing competition in Manhattan, the low wages of Off-Broadway, and the unwanted but unavoidable jobs in the provinces, is dead serious and exceedingly honest: just ask all the New Yorkers currently working at Disney World. There’s also a fine moment when a couple of characters reflect on Jack Morris’s decision to go to law school; they can’t help but see it as throwing their own choice — to remain in the theater — into question. Anyone who’s ever worried about a life in the arts will find this relevant. As I’ve said, Laughing Stock is uneven: Jack Holloway’s direction is hit-and-miss in the first act, when it needs to be precise; some of this, I fear, is attributable to mediocre acting. Kristen Garza’s barn-theater set is first-rate, though, as is Gi Young Sung’s costuming. I’m delighted to see Hat Trick performing in the Murray space, but I fear that the company’s not yet living up to its new digs. In other words: Casting is destiny, and leaves no room for amateurism. Even in small parts, the right performers are needed.
But I won’t complain further. I can’t. I’m still laughing.
This article appears in May 19-26, 2016.