Michael Frayn's farce Noises Off has entered the classical comedy canon in the 20-odd years since it was first produced. The version currently running through Nov. 16 at Pasadena Playhouse, a co-production with San José Repertory Theatre where it was initially staged, is slightly different from the original as, as Frayn admits, "There's nothing like having to sit through a play twelve million times to make your fingers itch for the delete key." The original three acts have been reduced to two, sort of, but they're all called Act One in the script. As Frayn blandly explained, "There is an interval between Act One and Act One. There is no interval between Act One and Act One."
As much fun as it is to watch, however, to read it is somewhat daunting, as it occurs both onstage and backstage as the characters rehearse a play-within-the-play, Nothing On. Actors leap from their onstage to their offstage characters, and the middle, backstage section occurs primarily non-verbally as Nothing On is being performed. Jamie Day, who plays Brooke, the requisite character who ends up scampering about in her underwear, recalled that before her audition, "I got the script, and I couldn't make head or tails out of it. I thought, I could sit and try and decipher this or I could just go"—and here she whispers abashedly—"rent the movie, watch that, and make some sense of what was going on." It sounded like a plan until she was cast and attended the first rehearsal, where director Richard Seyd instructed the actors, "Whatever you do, don't watch the movie." Oops.
"It's a very tricky task," explained the handsomely silvered Seyd, who finds the structure of the play paramount to a production's success. "My first impression when I read the play was that the third act—which is now part of the second act—was, on the page, the funniest act. When I saw the production in New York I felt like the third act didn't really work very well. I felt like the second act was the peak—the climax —and by the third act the audience was a little exhausted after seeing the backstage part of the farce, so I set myself the task of trying to build it so that the third act was also the funniest in front of the audience."
The play is, after all, two completely different plays inextricably linked in one production, and that's how Seyd approaches it. "You really have to treat the first act not as a farce." He clarified, "There's a very important distinction that has to be made, and this is the mistake I've seen some subsequent production of the play make—the play within the play is a farce. It's not a great farce, but it's a farce. The Noises Off sections—the actors rehearsing the play—you have to rhythmically play differently than you would play the farce. The mistake people make is, they play the actors rehearsing the play at the same rhythm as they play the farce. If you can avoid that mistake, then you start to get the rhythm of the play right."
To this end he rehearsed them separately. "I took Nothing On out of the play, and we spent the first four days of the rehearsal just rehearsing that," said the director. "It's about a 20 to 25 minute play. I asked the actors to learn the lines as mechanically as possible, to learn their cues, to be off book by first rehearsal. And we just drove it. The Noises Off section, we did that very, very slowly. I asked them to not learn the lines. I said we will do this by osmosis, the lines will come as we understand what is going on between the characters. When the audience sees the whole thing, the actors don't have to play it in a different way because they've already rehearsed it in a different way. The two plays exist in their bodies in different ways."
Things were no easier on the technical front. "I asked for two things," Seyd remembered. "I asked that I would have an extra week in studio, and I asked for a mock-up of the set be built from Day One so we could work on either side of the set—all the doors, all the stairs, everything. That is critical because it's a play set on two levels, it's to do with the timing of the doors and how they close and open and the rhythm of that. It's very hard to do this taped out on the floor. You can do it, but it saves an immense amount of time if you can build a set."
Continued Seyd, "Like all great comedy—and I think this is one of the great comedies—you have to do two things: You have to try to not get laughs before the audience understands what it's laughing at, which means you have to build the First Act very carefully.
It turns out, though, there's a counterintuitive rule to making zaniness work. "The most difficult thing is playing it straight. That's the trick," he said. "You have to play it as straight as you would play a drama. So you have to play it absolutely straight and you have to play it in such a way the audience feels they're discovering where the humor is. Farce," Seyd encapsulated, "is like Ibsen on speed."
Back Stage West night at Noises Off, with discounted tickets, is Oct. 24.
"Noises Off," continues at the Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Tue.-Fri. 8 p.m., Sat. 5 & 9 p.m., Sun. 2 & 7 p.m. Oct. 10-Nov. 16. $39.50-44.50. (626) 356-7529.