Noises Of spirals into chaos in its second act.
Photo courtesy of Ross Mortensen
This winter’s long-awaited theatrical production, Noises Off, astonished the PMAC recently with its groundbreaking performances. Written in 1982 by Michael Frayn, the play was different than past Choate productions because it involved a play within the play. In Noises Off, a dysfunctional group of actors tries? to put together Act One of Nothing On, driving the director, Lloyd, to grow mad and spiral out of control. As their performance worsens, they are forced to improvise. The play was brought to life by talented Choate students, and its intense action, two-story set, and impeccable timing were made possible by the hard work of the entire cast and crew team.
Will Flamm ’21, who played Lloyd, captured his character’s irritable and sarcastic nature perfectly. Flamm has been acting and singing since he was young, and has always been involved with theatre at school. He said, “I feel like my role was especially weird because I don’t really come on stage often in the first act of the show. I’m typically saying a lot of lines off stage in the audience. I memorize lines through a physical process where I have to go through the motions. At a particular moment, I do a certain gesture, and I remember the line. With this show, you can’t do that. You have to actually watch the show, and memorize everyone else’s lines to pick up on your line.”
It wasn’t easy for the small cast to perfect the fast-paced show. Flamm elaborated, “I feel like the biggest challenge for the cast in general was getting up to a comedic speed where our lines went on top of one another. In the rehearsal process, we don’t know our lines, we still don’t know the blocking, and so we lose a lot of the humor. But once we get onstage, we have to pick up the pace and become faster and faster.”
Allison Kleinstein ’21, who was part of the crew, worked tirelessly with the other members to make the costumes, gather props, and keep the small details in order. Kleinstein has been involved in every Choate production since her freshman fall.
Before and during the show, the crew are busy helping the actors with their makeup, costume changes, and setting up the stage. Kleinstein said, “The show has a very large set that takes a lot of setting up. Between acts, we flip the entire thing around. There are three acts, so we flip it twice.”
Kleinstein’s favorite part of the show is a moment in Act Two when a bottle of fake alcohol passes through the hands of nearly every character, in a series of complex blocking. Although the cast seems at any one moment on stage, at least five times as many crew and tech team members, along with two stage managers, keep the show running smoothly.
Noises Off was originally scheduled to be performed in the fall term, but complications with the PMAC flooding moved it to the winter.
According to Ms. Deighna DeRiu, the director of the play, the delay of the show until the end of the winter term didn’t affect the production as much as she thought it would, because all of the original student-actors remained with the show through winter.
DeRiu said, “The second act was hard to block because a lot of it was timing, but it isn’t necessarily timed with speech. There are two things going on at once that rely on timing: the play they’re doing and backstage comedy.
Audience reception was incredible, and laughter echoed throughout the show. Jules Dubel ’20, who managed the curtains, said, “I think it’s a different sort of humor than people expect because of its play-within-a-play nature. It requires a bit of metacognition to understand all of what’s going on.”
Sabrina Hsu ’20 said, “I think the rotating stage and set was so cool, and the actors were phenomenal. They really suited the roles they were doing.”
