Many people who aren't actors have nightmares about being center stage. According to statistics, public speaking terrifies even more than death and illness. Playwrights Christopher Durang and Tom Stoppard mine these fears brilliantly in their respective short plays The Actor's Nightmare and The Real Inspector Hound. In Durang's piece, an accountant finds himself called on to step into roles in plays he hasn't rehearsed, and the plays keep changing. In Stoppard's, a second-string critic with murderous jealousy finds himself on stage in an Agatha Christie-like whodunit.
These are plays for those who love theatre, and George Allison's elaborate scene design beautifully realizes that warmth. He provides a West End-style wooden proscenium complete with red curtains, velvet boxes with brass railings, footlights, wooden boards to tread, and even a couple of chandeliers hanging over the audience. The pre-show announcement also demonstrates affection (and inside jokes) for theatregoers: a tuxedoed man (Oliver Burns) with a plummy British accent begins the usual speech when into the stage-left box come two actors who comically break every rule (talk on a cell phone for the Yankee scores, eat, etc.). It's a style of humor that is broad and silly, which also explains why director Peter Jensen succeeds better with the Durang than with the Stoppard, which really needs a lighter touch.
As accountant George Spelvin, Michael Black's growing hysteria at being thrown into productions of Private Lives, Hamlet, and a surreally reinvented Happy Days is hilarious. It's truly dreamlike — Spelvin is still carrying a martini in Hamlet. Therese Tucker nicely captures a harried stage manager sidling on to whisper lines, while Burns' Henry Irving as Horatio conveys "you've got to be kidding" with each disgusted glance. Sara Goff's Dame Ellen Terry sparkles. Jensen stresses the play's campiness rather than its darker existential overtones, which is fine.
But spoofing grows tedious in The Real Inspector Hound. Stoppard's parody of a manor-house murder mystery includes a maid, Mrs. Drudge (Nan Wray), who answers the phone with exposition, and stock characters who recite their backstories; he also sends up pretentious, philosophizing reviewers (one invokes Dante). But its glory is in its verbal dexterity and bizarre leaps of logic. Julian Elfer's handsome, frustrated Moon, the second string critic, unfortunately emphasizes each line in his riffs about understudy revolt. Jensen has all the play-within-a-play actors do the same, employing similar sing-song delivery. A sequence involving Drudge filling coffee cups gets laughs at its own expense — its humor should be in its tedium. Rick Forstmann nicely undersells Birdboot, a lascivious older critic, but by the time Michael W. Murray's Inspector Hound comes on, the comedy has stalled.
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