Artistic Director David Muse started the First Rehearsal presentation by recounting his first interaction with the play. “Sometimes a play arrives on your desk, and you read it, and you feel like it’s all worked out, and you can picture the production really clearly in your head…and then sometimes you read a play like Laugh. It amazes you, it fascinates you, and it makes you laugh, and yet you have no idea what a production of that play is going to look like.” Muse described how “jazzed” everyone at Studio was to tackle this imaginative challenge head on—from mine explosions, to chasing butterflies, to swift scene transitions from a garden to a parlor to a movie palace in one fell swoop.
Playwright Beth Henley described the genesis of Laugh as a direct reaction to finishing work on her critically acclaimed dark comedy The Jacksonian: “It really was a reaction to the dark. After The Jacksonian I needed a lot of light. I was looking around at the world, what was going on, and I needed a lot of light. And one of the few things that made me happy was watching old movies—watching people fall down and stick pies in other people’s faces.”
In “risking to be unabashedly corny” for the first time in her career, Henley drew from the rich traditions of early American films to create a one-of-a-kind slapstick saga of her own. Director David Schweizer described his attraction to the piece based on its intersection of classic film with classic Henley: “She has carved a unique voice out of territories I admired. There is an innate joy in Beth’s referencing this world—the extremes of emotion in this world, the uses of comedy, the slapstick. All of these factors are woven into this story of Mabel and Roscoe, which is very Beth Henley. It contains an element that is part of every play she’s written, which is this extreme compassion—a hard-bitten empathy—for the outsiders amongst us, how they carve their way through life, the cost of it, and the rewards.”
To translate this world of early film back to the stage, Schweizer and scenic designer Andromache Chalfant explored the convergence of vaudeville theatres that housed the first silent films and how those mediums intersected at a unique period in the history of entertainment in this country. In creating a vaudeville-esque environment where two-dimensional images can step out into the third dimension before our eyes, the design embodies the spirit of both genres. A crucial production element is a live pianist who will underscore throughout and provide occasional narration. Tony Award-nominated composer Wayne Barker is creating original compositions for the production and will perform this key role in each performance.
Henley ended the presentation by joking that tackling a slapstick world premiere with a dingbat protagonist could potentially end with “pie on one’s face,” but after this sneak peek of Laugh, it is clear that the only wayward desserts Henley has to worry about will be thrown onstage.
https://issuu.com/839998/docs/laugh_program_for_issuu