“Noises Off!”: Samo theater’s successful disaster

Samo theater’s production of “Noises Off!” is a play about a play — “Nothing On,” the fictional play within “Noises Off!” is supposed to drive the stage’s comic tension with its failure. The actors and audience members were therefore hoping for some disaster, and, due to excellent execution on stage, their desires were fulfilled.The play within a play begins with a wincingly bad rehearsal the night before the play “Nothing On” is set to premiere, and the audience laughs along as things go from bad to worse. You can’t help but be charmed by the oddballs hoping that they’ll pull through and manage to get through the show. As “Nothing On” only goes downhill, “Noises Off!” goes uphill, eliciting a multitude of laughs from the audience.But for the cast members, reality mimicked fiction as their first performance of “Noises Off!” inched closer and closer. It was the night before the first show, and much like the fictional cast in the play, things were not going according to plan. The list of chaotic incidents included a set that had not been completely put together and a student who fainted from exhaustion.“There were some trips and falls and missed entrances and exits that reminded us of the actual play,” theatre director Kate Soller said.The set of Samo’s production of “Noises Off!” was not completely built until the day of the first performance, and rehearsals were hindered due to the lack of a set. According to Soller, this staging was quite a bit more elaborate than normal in the Humanities Center, with two stories and six doors. To add to that, the designer Al Hobbs is currently in Atlanta working on “The Hunger Games” and was unable to help build the set. The set also had to be double checked for safety.“This was definitely difficult for the entire cast, as this show relies heavily on the set,” actress Julia Ruff (’16) said. “However, our cast is a very tight family, so we all worked very well together without any major problems, unlike the cast of ‘Nothing On.’”According to Caragh Tiernan (’14), who played Dotty/Mrs. Clackett, some of the Samo cast members began taking on traits of their characters.“Eventually as the play went on we started to understand what each type of character was,” actor Michael Sze (’14). “In the beginning it’s just words, but we kind of got a feel for how each character was supposed to be portrayed as time moved forward.”In order to immerse themselves in the characters, the actors had to fill out character packets explaining the backgrounds, hobbies, interests and quirks of their characters. The actors also spent rehearsals manifesting in their acting what they thought their characters were like internally and externally.“The difficulty with this was that you would have to think not how you would play the character that was on the stage of ‘Nothing On’ but how the off-stage character would play him or her,” Actor Glenn Morizio (’14) who played Garry/Roger said.Tiernan said productions generally tend to feel like they’re in pieces during tech week, creating similar feeling for the Samo cast as the cast of “Nothing On” experienced.“You have to work on running through the show but also have to stop to work out the different kinks,” Tiernan said. “Also there is always drama when doing a show — it’s inescapable, [although] our cast never got anywhere close to the same degree as the characters did though in terms of fighting or tension.”But the one big difference between “Noises Off!” and the fictional play “Nothing On” is that unlike the cast of “Nothing On”, the cast of “Noises Off!” manages to execute their play brilliantly. Each act moves smoothly into the next, and the cast’s great chemistry creates hilarity that makes “Noises Off!” a must-see.