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A falling boar’s head. A dead body that won’t stay dead. With props and physical comedy, The Play That Goes Wrong kept the audience in stitches on Jan. 29 from start to finish.
Onstage at the Armory until Feb. 15, The Play That Goes Wrong is a collaboration between Portland Center Stage and Seattle Repertory Theatre. This award-winning play has charmed audiences since it opened on Broadway in 2017. It centers on opening night for the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society’s production of the 1920s murder mystery Murder of Haversham Manor. The cast and crew stumble their way through forgotten lines, a crumbling set, and chaotic events in this play within a play. Watching something fall apart in real time might provide a catharsis for the stresses of our current nightmare-scape reality, but that’s only part of this play’s appeal.
Actors constantly try to cover disasters with the set and each other, bringing spontaneous applause from the audience throughout the performance. Charles Haversham, played by Ian Bond, is murdered at his engagement party. After being pronounced dead, Bond moves stiffly toward the door, trying to look inconspicuous. The butler forgets his lines and mispronounces words although the inspector corrects him several times. There will be multiple suspects. The inspector, played by Darius Pierce, tries to solve the murder, along with being Murder’s fictional director. Ashley Song and Ashley Lanyon play iterations of Florence, Haversham’s fiancée, after she is knocked out by a swinging door. Meanwhile, Florence is having an affair with Charles’s brother Cecil, played spectacularly by Chris Murray. Charles’s friend Thomas, played by Setareki, keeps the audience on edge by holding furniture in place on the tilting second-floor balcony. The entire cast engages the audience with standout performances, playing bad actors in a disastrous play.
Precise timing and dialogue keep The Play That Goes Wrong moving fast. The props are like actors themselves, taking on a role that brought down the house—and the set. Paintings fall off the wall and some objects at Haversham Manor are humorously misplaced. Like the prop department, the set contains key characters: a living room with a chaise longue and fireplace, a large window looking out on the night sky, an elevator and the precarious second-floor library.
Jaclyn Kanter, The Play that Goes Wrong’s stage manager, guides the crew coordinating all the mishaps, but sometimes things accidentally go wrong for real. A chandelier was supposed to drop during a recent performance, for example, but got caught and only bounced.
“Everything is very carefully created and locked in so that everyone can do their best work and everyone can be safe, but it requires both the onstage actors and the backstage crew to move almost in a balletic kind of ensemble of timing and movement,” says Marissa Wolf, PCS’s artistic director. “There’s a moment when a boar’s head falls from high up and crashes down and a character catches it. But that character has to be standing in the exact right place, not only to catch it, but also not to get hurt.”
Actors from both theaters rehearsed over the summer and first performed in Seattle. They joined the production crew in Portland following a three-month break. The actors excel at physical comedy, earning gasps and well-meaning shouted instructions from the audience when they stand near falling objects. If any of these moves weren’t planned, it would be impossible for the audience to know because of the nonstop activity on the stage. Watching The Play That Goes Wrong requires constant observation of the moving parts. It offers theatergoers some much-needed levity when life feels like it’s holding up as well as Haversham Manor.
SEE IT: The Play That Goes Wrong at Portland Center Stage at The Armory, 128 NW 11th Ave., 503-445-3700, pcs.org. 7:30 pm Wednesday–Friday, 2 and 7:30 pm Saturday and Sunday, through Feb. 15. Additional 2 pm matinee Thursday, Feb. 5; no evening performance Sunday, Feb. 8. $39–$98.
