It’s like ordering a cheeseburger at a Michelin star restaurant and you keep waiting for the next bite to be revelatory and then you’re finished. You get the nagging feeling that it’s “just” a really good cheeseburger.
It’s like going to the Monet room at the Art Institute and, amid the haystacks, you find that “American Gothic” has been hung to celebrate its return from another seemingly endless tour. You can’t help trying to interpret the Grant Wood classic anew, hoping if you stare at it long enough the lighting will change.
It’s like going to the Steppenwolf Theater and seeing a solidly amusing production of the intricately crafted British-sex-farce-within-a-British-sex farce “Noises Off.”
Oh wait, no, it is that last one.
There is plenty to enjoy in this production, directed by Anna D. Shapiro, director of powerful Steppenwolf premieres like “August: Osage County,” “The Minutes,” “The Pain and the Itch,” and many other discomfiting works that, unlike this one, make you squirm while you laugh.
There is one shatteringly good performance, from Andrew Leeds, and another lovable one, from Francis Guinan.
But this is simply an adequate — not exceptional — production of a play that’s an ace exercise in farcical form, in the context of a company that has laid a claim to the theater as a place for the artistically consequential. Context matters, and this comedy has perhaps never felt emptier of substance than on this stage.
Michael Frayn’s 1982 play follows the travails of a regional English company preparing and touring a production of a sex farce, with all the physical shenanigans of the genre. As the play’s director (Rick Holmes) explains, it’s a show about “doors and sardines,” as in, “Getting the sardines on and getting the sardines off.” In Act I, as they try to get through a dress rehearsal, we learn about the various affairs happening among the cast. In Act II, we go backstage and watch these play out as they perform. And in Act III, well, it perhaps inspired the more recent “The Play That Goes Wrong.”
It’s a fair question to ask: What more could you expect than the decently done? After all, it’s “Noises Off” and you’re going to get “Noises Off.” Enjoy!
No doubt, many will.
But I did hope for more, particularly with a cast that includes the Steppenwolf regulars Audrey Francis, Ora Jones and James Vincent Meredith.
The Steppenwolf is an ensemble theater that has its own history of backstage affairs and marriages and drama. Was it too much to expect that there would be insights, a greater sense of the intimate connections made among artists who expose their inner selves to each other and then experience love and loss? Could Frayn’s chaos have been made more … I don’t know, real? Because there’s no authentic passion, or even lust, in this show. Just lines and movement representing those.
Or perhaps the inherent meta qualities of a performance about performers could have been played up. Could the actors-as-characters have felt more alive, the separation from the types they play in the play-within-the-play delineated more sharply? Meredith, an essential Steppenwolf ensemble member, plays an actor who wants to know why he’s carrying a box offstage, whose wife has just left him, and whose nose bleeds at the slightest signs of a physical quarrel. None of those feel like more than comic circumstances to be made fun of here.
More ambitiously, maybe the physical humor could have been executed to the level where it becomes high art. Could the frenetic silent activities in Act II have been choreographed to become a type of dance? It’s all timed well enough, but it doesn’t have any particularly impressive precision.
Or, finally, I could have settled for a simpler hope, that we’d feel a special joy emanate from this stage, a sense that everyone on it is having a blast doing this, feeling a certain freedom from having to manufacture grander meaning.
It’s not that this show plods, or that the performances aren’t spirited. They are. But only two rise to a special level. Leeds, a Los Angeles actor and writer, takes his gregariously inarticulate character and builds an onstage double-take in Act I into full-on neurosis in Act III, and nails the physical humor as well. And Guinan’s is the one performance that seems fully informed by all the parts he’s played before, borrowing audience knowledge of his persona to make simple speeches contain a humorous sense of history.
But the rest is just a very good cheeseburger.