What did our critic think of THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG at PCPA: Solvang Festival Theater?

“The Play That Goes Wrong” is a side-splittingly funny production not to be missed. The laughs begin as you enter the theater and last to the final bows. It’s a play that goes wrong by design, of course, and then goes more wrong in service of our amusement as the “Cornley Drama Society” puts on the murder mystery “The Murder at Haversham Manor.” 

Director Roger DeLaurier has meticulously crafted all this wrong-doing with clock-like precision. The cast and crew of the Agatha Christie-like play struggle valiantly to keep the show going as the set comes undone around them. As the amateur thespians of the play within this play, the cast takes on increasingly wacky physical contortions so the show can go on (actor Erik Stein’s lanky frame pays dividends here). The set has been expertly crafted because every element works like a trap waiting to spring on the cast and crew.

If the artistic and production teams had been less than perfect with their timing and construction, you can easily imagine real harm. There are Buster Keaton-like stunts that dazzle us because they toe the line of real danger, live, in front of us--a high-wire act. “The Play That Goes Wrong” is also the play that might go truly wrong. And if there’s a touch of blood sport in comedy, it’s in our collective schadenfreude. In a particularly funny bit, actor Toby Tropper, as the newly discovered corpse of Charles Haversham, covers his wincing pain as his cast mates unintentionally inflict bodily harm on him. This play proves Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s observation that “nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” 

The play's pacing builds the comic effects; the accumulation of everything. One of the show’s highlights is a fight scene between two murder suspects, Robert Grove (Erik Stein) and Max Bennett (Cameron Vargas as an affable ham). A delightful scene on its own, it satirizes the gravitas inherent in all extended sword-fighting choreography. It’s “The Princess Bride” meets “Deathtrap.”  

They say that even people who have never performed as actors have the “actor’s nightmare” where you’re onstage, forced to act in a role for which you haven't learned the lines. Of course, this is one of the things that goes wrong. Anyone can relate to the discomfort and embarrassment of flailing public performance. “The Play That Goes Wrong” offers a special appeal, however, to anyone who has participated in theater. Who doesn’t delight in recognizing these personalities from “The Cornely Drama Society”: the Diva, the Ham, the Revered Actor, and the requisite all-black clad, headset-surgically-attached, long-suffering Crew? And theater folk will appreciate the humor of missing props, misplaced furniture, dodgy carpentry, and scene partners who drop lines or drop you. 

For an extra treat, check out the program for Murder at Haversham Manor enclosed in your regular play program.