By A.D. Amorosi
In 2012, Great Britain’s Mischief Theatre Company’s playwrighting co-founders Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields created an imaginary world, the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society (Cornley U for us Yanks), where so-called classics of Brit-literature became manically messy, accident-prone physical comedy in the hands of their amateurish theater troupe.
The end result: The Play That Goes Wrong.
In May 2023, while Mischief ’s goofball iteration of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan Goes Wrong opened on Broadway, Philadelphia’s 1812 Productions—the area’s sole theater company dedicated to comedy—conquered the klutzy The Play That Goes Wrong for sold-out audiences at Plays & Players Theatre with 1812’s boss, director Jen Childs, at its helm.
Now 1812’s Producing Artistic Director Childs, her athletic original cast (Anthony Lawton, Scott Greer, Justin Jain, Sean Close, Ian Merrill Peakes, Melanie Cotton, Karen Peakes) and its Fight Coordinator-turnedon-stage “Stage Manager” Eli Lynn bring the kinetic mayhem of The Play That Goes Wrong to Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival for the start of its summer season.
Philadelphia audiences are used to seeing two of its leads, Anthony Lawton and Scott Greer, mouthing the dramatic words of Pinter, Mamet, Shakespeare, and Ibsen. Yet when it came to The Play That Goes Wrong, this pair of Barrymore Award-winning thespians doubly focused, hysterically, on avoiding breaking bones as mastering its highly physical comedy can be as dangerous as it looks on-stage.
“You have to make yourself safe, while maintaining the look of danger on this set—like I have to wear protective soles on my shoes to be extra grip-py,” said Greer.
“The rehearsal process for this show, as opposed to dramas or other comedies that I’ve performed, comes down to physical problem solving, to how things work mechanically THEN, how do we make it look as if we’re doing it for the first time,” said Lawton of The Play That Goes Wrong.
“Normally I might be thinking about more interior or emotional things, but here, it’s primarily physical.”
There is, of course, wiggle room for improvisation on a nightly basis. During its previews, Lawton—who shares an over 30-year friendship with Greer—and his friend/fellow 1812- mate had to suddenly wrestle control over certain stage props. “We had to figure out certain configurations quickly, something funnier looking than anything we had already tried,” stated Lawton.
But make no mistake: what looks unwieldiest about the flailing-about aspects of The Play That Goes Wrong is as precise as a sniper’s bullet.
“This show is lots of comedy math, prop math, and problem solving in this really insane way,” said Eli Lynn. “Jennifer Childs is great at that. With her, the best idea in the room wins. Everyone considers all the options. Other times, it is a matter of just putting a lot of funny people in a room, and seeing what happens.”
A veteran of many of 1812’s works, including its annual faux-news comedy, This Is the Week That Is, Sean Close laughed when he recognized that The Play That Goes Wrong was different than anything that Jen Childs had ever offered him.
“The process of doing The Play That Goes Wrong, the severity of the challenge of this beast, is unlike anything I have worked on with Jen,” he said. “We knew that, at its start, that this wasn’t going to feel fun or funny—that we’re going to feel as if we don’t know where we are or why we’ve repeated things so many times— but addressing the comedy calculus problem and putting all of our clown-brains together was essential.”
So, how does an actor control the uncontrollable when it comes to The Play That Goes Wrong?
“With lots of practice,” said Greer. “Jen (Childs) wisely gave us a full week of rehearsal on set, before we started tech, because THE SET is the main character of this play…. And there were several moments where things went quickly out of control, fell from my hands and smashed spectacularly.”
On the topic of corralling chaos while relaying the playwrights’ high (hilarious) points, Sean Close claimed that their staged endeavor was a matter of coordination above-all-else. “I’m using the double meaning of that: physical coordination and in relation to tackling the script,” said Close. “That script was brilliantly engineered and workshopped by Mischief Theatre into this incredible machine where there are several layers of things happening at once. I mean, audiences will see 1812 actors playing other actors in character whose play is likely bad while working toward its goal of maintaining the murder mystery at hand while navigating the roadmap of pratfalls and a set breaking apart. So, there are several layers of ‘meta’-ness at work in The Play That Goes Wrong.”
Lynn, responsible for choreographing the madness of onstage combat, falls and trips, quickly seconded Close’s emotion by saying, “It’s having to create the mayhem of an actual live performance layered on top of manufactured mayhem.”
As 1812 Productions is Philadelphia’s smart, sole all-comedy theater company, the word is king. What then does it mean, to transpose the spirit of intelligent loquaciousness into hardcore pratfalls and head slams?
“Language definitely takes a back seat in this play to the arc of its action,” said Lawton. “There is not a lot of funny language in The Play That Goes Wrong, but rather funny ways to say very banal things, while tripping over each other and hopefully not getting hurt too badly.”
Close agreed with his co-star Lawton. “When you’re doing something with wit and bantering back-and-forth, you’re on the ride more seamlessly,” he said. “The Play That Goes Wrong chews you up as an actor, spits you out, then you’re in the wings asking yourself what happened. My fight or flight doing this show is high…very high. Looking like we’re getting hurt without actually getting hurt is our goal. That’s what controlled chaos truly means.”
In discussing the living-breathing-coughing-wheezing-wonky set of The Play That Goes Wrong (from 1812 Scenic Designer Colin McIlvaine), Close poked fun at a tried-and-true theatrical maxim. “You know how people say that the set is another character? In this play, it is the main character,” he said. “And as things break down (editor’s note: quite literally) you’ll see the backstage crew hard at work with us.”
Considering the constant surprise and perfect (silly) storm of its last sold-out run at The Play That Goes Wrong, Close expects that Pennsylvania Shakespeare Fest audiences will be equally amazed—almost as much as its actors are.
“Everything is precise-precise-precise with this show, so the fun thing is figuring out how this cast can pull it all off every night,” said Lynn of its planned accidents.
“There’s so much in this show… it’s so saturated with hijinks, that it has incredible re-watch-ability,” said Close encouraging anyone who witnessed The Play That Goes Wrong at Plays & Players to drive up the turnpike to DeSales U