What I learned. . .
A director friend once told me, “Now that I’ve directed Noises Off, nothing will scare me again.” Getting to work on Michael Frayn’s sublime farce, is a director’s lesson in craft – as well as a lesson in a certain kind of bravery. Staging the play is such a great exercise in clear, precise story-telling. Often I found myself telling the actors, “if you’ve got to pass the bottle from point ‘a’ to point ‘b’, you’ve really got to pass the bottle. . . arc it higher, let our eyes spot the action. . . the audience will be lost if they don’t know how or when the bottle got to point ‘b’.”
This was my second time to direct the play, and I was able to build on what I remembered from my first time in the ring with this hysterical, challenging piece of writing at Milwaukee Repertory Theatre. Again: most of that had to do with how high to arc the bottle. Or the sardines. Or the flowers. Or the axe.
We had a short rehearsal schedule, made all the tighter by my late arrival in Lancaster from the Midwest, where the production of Duet for One I directed for Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, had previewed two days before I started rehearsals for Noises Off. Fortunately, Marc Robin had been entirely amendable to letting me come late and to casting actors (save one) with whom I had worked before (fortunately, he liked them all when they came in to audition). And everyone attacked the work with the same sense of “we’re going to work very, very hard – and we’re going to have a lot of fun in the bargain.” Which we did. (It would be impossible not to work hard and have fun when you’ve got Jane Ridley leading the corps as Dottie Otley – but everyone kept apace with Jane, and everyone always managed to say “yes” . . . to be real problem solvers, each and every step – or pratfall – of the way.)
This coupled with wonderful designers (I always admire a set designer who’s willing to design a set that actually looks cheap and cheesey. . . I’ve taken exception to other productions of the play I’ve seen in which there was no credible way the “Nothing On” set could have been designed and built on the budget the errant traveling troupe must have put together – let alone be able to tour the provinces for weeks and months. . .), and it was great fun to figure out once again the tracking of all those sheets and all those sheiks.
I can think of few better ways to spend a number of hours of your life than laughing the way we get to laugh when we work on this play. Thank you, Michael Frayn; thanks Marc Robin; thanks Fulton staff and design team; thank you Jane, Bryan, Zack, Christopher, Tarah, Deanne, Nick, David, and Chelsey. Could not have had a better time.