January 13, 2008 in City

‘Laughing Stock’ lives up to its name

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Every theater season hides a sleeper, an unknown play that won’t sell any season subscriptions but turns out to be one of the favorites of the year.

“Laughing Stock” is the Spokane Civic Theatre’s sleeper – a marvelous and hilarious backstage comedy. I can’t remember when I’ve laughed so hard during a show on the Main Stage.

Throw in a few tears as well – some stemming from the play’s touching and sentimental look at the theater “family,” some because I was laughing so hard – and you have a show that is not only funny but also emotionally satisfying.

“Laughing Stock” is about a group of goofy, talented, pompous and borderline insane theater people, trying to put together the umpty-ninth summer stock season at The Playhouse, a drafty barn in New Hampshire. The season consists of “Charley’s Aunt,” “Dracul, Prince of the Undead” and “Hamlet.” We get to see pieces of all of these plays in rehearsal, in performance and in the case of “Hamlet,” from backstage.

The botched performance of “Dracul” ranks right up there among the single funniest scenes I’ve ever seen on a Spokane stage. Dracul gets his cape caught in a door, a moving treadmill goes berserk and an intern walks on with a tea tray at exactly the wrong moment. This litany of goof-ups doesn’t begin to capture the comic genius of this scene, because almost all of it is character-based and carefully set up many scenes earlier by playwright Charles Morey and director Troy Nickerson. We have come to know these actors, which makes their travails that much more priceless.

Nickerson is the perfect director for this show. As much as I respect Morey’s script, I can see that in uninspired hands, this show would be amusing but hardly memorable. It borrows many of the conventions familiar from “Noises Off” – the ditzy broad, the elderly veteran, the pompous artiste – and unapologetically recycles them.

Yet Nickerson brings intelligence, comic instinct and pure stagecraft to make all of this seem fresh, funny and lacking in obvious artifice. And Nickerson always seems to be able to assemble an exceptionally strong cast, yet one that – and this is key – emerges even stronger than the sum of its parts.

I don’t have the space to give proper credit to everyone in this 14-member ensemble, but I have to mention the key quadrumvirate of Patrick McHenry-Kroetch, Paul Villabrille, Susan Hardie and Thomas Heppler.

McHenry-Kroetch plays the preening leading man, Tyler Taylor, who swans around in his cape as Dracul, aka Vlad the Impaler. McHenry-Kroetch invests just the right amount of horn-dog vanity into lines like, “The thing you have to remember about Vlad: He IS the impaler.”

He also delivers the single funniest line of the show, “My orangutan is NOT bisexual.” You’ll just have to see it to understand.

He also throws a hilarious fit of pique when he discovers that the nonexistent budget doesn’t allow for an actual door to his castle– just “fabric artfully draped.”

Later he proposes that he should dramatically “morph” onstage from a bat into Dracul.

This gives Hardie, perfect as the no-nonsense stage manager Sarah McKay, the chance to deliver this speech: “There is no door. And there won’t be one unless you pick one up and morph it in with you.”

To which Tyler replies: “I can do that.”

Villabrille delivers a reliably excellent performance as Jack Morris, a young actor contemplating law school. Holding the entire proceedings together is Heppler, as director Gordon Page, the emotional center of the show.

Heppler delivers some moving Hamlet soliloquies and articulates Morey’s intense love for this art form and the people who “tell stories in the dark on a summer night.”

In the end, “Laughing Stock” has nothing but admiration for people who give their time and energy to such a noble cause, even without the budget for a door.

I should issue one disclaimer here: “Laughing Stock” is loaded with inside theater jokes, and I sometimes wondered if audiences would “get” them. Judging from the opening night laughter: Yeah, they got them.

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