Walnut Street theatre presents Michael Frayn's 'Noises Off'

Frayn’s 1982 backstage farce has proved its mettle across three Broadway mountings, a half-dozen stands on London’s West End, and innumerable stagings in regional theater. Frank Anzalone’s high-octane interpretation for WST ranks among the strongest I’ve seen.

Working with fight director Darren Hengst, Anzalone meets the intricate demands of Frayn’s hurtling script with near-balletic precision. Even casual theatergoers know that farce requires perfectly timed entrances and exits. “That’s what it’s all about: doors and sardines,” intones Lloyd Dallas (Greg Wood, dry and wonderful), director of the doomed play-within-a-play Nothing On. “Getting on, getting off. Getting the sardines on, getting the sardines off.”

To everyone’s exasperation, this proves easier said than done. In the first act, which takes the form of a vexing dress rehearsal, leading lady Dotty Otley (Mary Martello) leaves the sardines but takes the telephone. Then she takes the sardines when she’s meant to leave them. Her costar Garry Lejeune (Ben Dibble) does battle with a stuck door, while bombshell Brooke Ashton (Alanna J. Smith) flails around in search of a lost contact lens. Everyone hits their mark, but something is always slightly off.

So much of the play’s humor depends on meticulous physical and verbal delivery; the presentation of a farce going wrong must look as elegant and orchestrated as a farce going right. This extraordinary company — which also includes John P. Connolly, Daniel Fredrick, Leonard C. Haas, Lauren Sowa, and Susan Riley Stevens — meet the challenges head-on.

Wind it up, watch it unravel

The relative calm and approximate accuracy of the rehearsal act lay the groundwork for the shenanigans that pervade the tense Act II (presented from a backstage purview) and freewheeling Act III (a particularly disastrous performance as seen from the house).

Individual moments shine throughout. Dibble loosens his limbs to tumble down the rickety stairs of Robert Koharchik’s bilevel set, earning justified applause. Fredrick proves an ace deadpan as Tim, the beleaguered stage manager who always seems a second away from being shoved onstage. (The production has some fun with understudy costumes, designed by Amanda Wolff). Stevens plays Belinda Blair, the company straight woman, with an appropriate hint of venom.

But the evening belongs, as any Noises Off should, to Dotty and Brooke. Martello presents Dotty as a grande dame gone to seed; her once-genteel offstage accent grows more harried as the proceedings wear on. Her deft abilities as a physical comedian are ever-apparent in the almost-silent second act, as she gets revenge on sometime-lover Garry by tying his shoelaces together with maniacal glee. By the third act, a flick of her wrist induces chortles.

Smith has been a standout of several recent WST productions, but she finds her light here as never before. Her purposefully vapid in-character delivery delightfully spoofs the dregs of bad acting; Brooke is the actor who will remain tethered to the script even as the set pieces start falling on her head. So when a dramatic revelation causes her to break character, it feels genuinely jarring.

The WST crew get the humor right. But they also understand that Noises Off is a love letter to theater, even in its most lowbrow iterations. The actors soldier on, even when they can’t bear the sight of one another. Stage management holds down the fort as best they can. No one gives up, even in the midst of a futile matinée. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that element of the play carried off so gracefully.

The popularity of Noises Off will likely continue for decades to come, particularly if theater companies put it across as well as it’s been done here. Take my advice and develop a taste for sardines.