My favorite theater mishap occurred years ago at the O'Neill Theatre Foundation in Waterford, Conn. I was sitting in a small outdoor amphitheater watching a play on the stage below, when I noticed that far behind me a thick fog was coming inland from Long Island Sound. As the play went on, the fog came closer and closer, and in only minutes it was covering the spectators in the back seats. Then it rolled — that's the only appropriate verb for it — down from the back seats toward the front and the stage. Now this was no bush-league thin Florida mist; this was a thick soupy blot-out-your-sight fog and it was billowing ever closer to the poor actors who were trying to ignore it. Then it happened: The fog reached the stage and utterly covered the actors, starting at their shoes then rising over their heads. Someone stopped the show, and we all were moved to an indoor site.
Eventually the play continued as if nothing abnormal had happened.
And maybe it was nothing abnormal — because as anyone who's ever worked in the theater knows, live theater means the possibility of trouble at every performance.
What kinds of trouble? Well, that's the point of Plays For Coarse Actors, the comedy now playing at the Silver Meteor Gallery in Ybor City. Michael Green's play — actually three one-act plays — is a sort of living compendium of theater disaster, including every possible crisis from missed cues to falling set pieces, unwieldy props, uncooperative lights and rambunctious wigs. Though this Hat Trick production isn't nearly as funny as it wants to be, it does include some moments that are simply hilarious — like a phone that keeps ringing even after a character has picked up the handset, or a Shakespearean actor carrying a sword that's so heavy he can't manage to defend himself.
Unfortunately, there's a sloppiness to the production that's not entirely intentional — even catastrophe needs exquisite timing — and some of the bad acting isn't wholly an affectation. Watching Coarse Actors, I couldn't help but remember another play on the same subject — Charles Morey's Laughing Stock — that was brilliantly produced at Sarasota's Asolo Theatre a year-and-a-half ago. Where the actors of the Asolo Company seemed utterly sincere — and precise — as they made an "unintended" travesty of the play they were staging, the Hat Trick troupe tries so hard in their inexact way to be funny that they aren't. Coarse Actors should be riotous; in this production it's mainly messy.
The first of the evening's three plays is called Streuth. Directed by Anthony Casale, it's supposed to remind us of Agatha Christie mysteries like The Mousetrap, and opens with portentous music that goes on and on and on as if someone has forgotten to cut the sound and raise the curtain.
Finally, we find ourselves witnessing a white-bearded inspector (Greg Morgan), dressed like Sherlock Holmes and attempting to solve a murder. Whatever can go wrong does: An actor forgets his lines and has to read them surreptitiously; someone mentions a grandfather clock, at which point a stagehand runs on and nails a phony clock to the phony wall; the Inspector interrogates a certain James (Jack Holloway), and inadvertently pulls off James' wig; and so on.
What's most troublesome here is that the bad acting isn't bad enough. For example, Jonathan Cho as Mr. Darcy (no relation to Jane Austen) is supposed to look like he has stage fright, but we feel the decision to be frightened, not the "real" fright itself. And Soolaf Rasheid works so hard at being a sexy French maid that the effect is never sexy.
There are some memorable moments: when the Inspector says he'll turn off a light, but the light won't turn off, or when the head of the dummy that's supposed to be the dead man falls off and has to be replaced. But for this comedy to work, we have to believe that we're watching a professional company doing its best in terrible circumstances — and we never quite feel that. Even Holloway, a fine actor, comes across as an amateur under these conditions, and that's no easy feat.
The second one-act is really a dance piece called Last Call for Breakfast and is introduced to us as an existentialist work with a touch of Samuel Beckett. This performance is also too approximate to really earn our laughter: A man and a woman (Curtis Belz and Jonelle Meyer) chant ominously on no particular subject ("Pea-green. Sea-green. Green as gangrene") while several actors engage in calisthenics and strike poses. Then a dancer (Magali Naas) roller-skates on stage wearing a large sugar cube, someone calls out "I see the sun" (and of course the stage goes dark), and we once again feel that somehow we're missing the fun.
As to the strange constructions behind which the actors stand, I have no idea what they're supposed to be or why they bear the letters "P" and "S." Does modern dance need to be mocked? Of course it does (it can take itself so seriously), but Last Call For Breakfast never finds the right note of mockery.
Still, there's one short play — the best of the three — to follow. This is Henry the Tenth, a parody of Shakespeare in which Henry (Robby Radle) fights for his kingdom against the pretender Cuthbert of Wolverhampton (Holloway). As in the previous one-acts, lots of things go wrong. A funeral procession is too loud and repetitive; pallbearers get stuck behind a closed door; a drummer (Paul McColgan) plays so loud we can't hear a Narrator; a messenger (Curtis Belz) between the rivals is repeatedly beaten up. The best things here are the drummer, Cynthia Yopp's mock-Elizabethan costumes, and a couple of occasions on which a set piece is knocked aside, and we find an actress in the course of dressing, or two actors locked in intimate embrace.
There's also some silly swordplay that reminds us of all the phony duels we've seen from Richard III to Hamlet. But once again, the general feeling (and this time the director is Lani McGettigan) is one of sloppiness and approximation, not of pro actors at their worst but of amateurs at their best. Even Jeff Boe's attractive set can't compensate for the all-too-fundamental disarray.
The moral of this story? Even anarchy needs a principle. Even chaos needs a certain order.
But these Plays for Coarse Actors mostly seem shoddy. And that's not funny.
This article appears in May 9-15, 2007.
