The Play That Goes Wrong

The last thing any cast or crew member wants is for something to go wrong in the middle of a live performance. The world of live theater is brought to life through weeks of long hours and repetition, all for the purpose of putting on an unforgettable act. Still, it is likely that someone’s pants ripping or a prop breaking on stage is memorable in its own way. There is never a perfect run of any show, and in most cases, the professionalism of the cast and crew means the audience does not notice if something goes wrong. But what if the show is supposed to go wrong? 

“The Play That Goes Wrong” is exactly what it sounds like — a farce in which everything goes sideways. From actors forgetting lines to walls crashing down, there are nearly 170 gags that happen from start to finish that end in a set left in pieces and the backstage crew "unintentionally" joining the actors on stage. 

The play first debuted in 2012 in London. Five years later, it hit the Broadway stage on April 2, 2017. Now, "The Play That Goes Wrong" made its debut at California Baptist University’s Wallace Theatre. Lee Lyons, director of the CBU theater program, is both the play's director and set designer. 

Lyons has been in the industry for more than 35 years. In that time, he has worked in nearly every role backstage. Whether designing both the lighting and sound or designing a set alongside directing, there is little that Lyons has not done within the technical side of theater. In this show particularly, it is a benefit to be both the set designer and the director because the roles require constant communication. 

“It allows me to solve all the problems because I’m already seeing what the director needs to have happen,” Lyons says.

He has never directed a show twice, so “The Play That Goes Wrong” is a new experience. During his time as a professor at California State University San Bernardino, where he taught for 20 years, Lyons directed a show similar to this one called “Noises Off.” He refers to both of these plays as backstage comedies that allow the audience to see the chaos behind the curtain. In “Noises Off,” the set turns around and shows the hustle and bustle of live theater behind the scenes during one of the acts, but in “The Play That Goes Wrong,” the backstage life is exposed differently. 

“We kind of show everything in one set,” Lyons says. “The set is all dressed, and then at different points, it starts to fall apart, and we get to see deeper into backstage.”

The main theme of “The Play That Goes Wrong” presents a theater troupe known as the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, who visits their sister school, CBU, to perform “The Murder at Haversham Manor.” It is a murder mystery written by the fictitious playwright, Susie H.K. Brideswell. Unfortunately, their set is stuck at the Los Angeles harbor, so CBU has built them a replacement set in under four days. As the play goes on, things go south little by little until everything, quite literally, falls apart. 

“Normally, when we build sets, we are not intent on them breaking,” Anthony Paulin, the technical director, says.

While a big portion of the comedy comes from the actors’ reactions and stunts, 66 gags belong to the set. Objects fall off the wall multiple times, a bucket catches fire, a door is ripped off its hinges, stage walls fall to the floor and a raised platform collapses while two actors are standing on it. Paulin even cut a second trapped door into the stage floor to allow one of the actors to crawl below the stage throughout the show. Paulin says his main goal is to "build this [set] so it can take a beating night after night, rehearsal after rehearsal and not damage the set, but more importantly, not damage the actors.” 

Lyons says the set itself is an extra member of the cast. As a character, it appears to have a sassy attitude as it reacts to the actors throughout the show. By intermission, several props have fallen off the wall, and it is the CBU stage crew’s job to put everything back in place during the break. However, it is a wasted effort because everything falls again seconds after the play resumes. It is as if the set is laughing at the crew for wasting 15 minutes of its time. 

In another scene, a shield falls and hits one of the actors in the face as he walks into the room. He responds by ripping it off the wall and throwing it off stage. There is also a point in the show when two other actors are trying to hold up props that begin to fall on their own while attempting to answer a telephone call. Finally, at the end of the show, as the character Charles Haversham finishes his big monologue, the chandelier falls right before the lights fade to black and the rest of the cast and crew scream in panic. 

“[The set] is a third character,” Annie Gibson, the shop foreman, echoes. In most productions, it is bad when props become a third character on stage. If a prop is left on stage unintentionally, it distracts the audience and takes away from the important things happening, therefore acting like an additional character. But “The Play That Goes Wrong" flips this idea on its head in a positive way because the seemingly unintentional mistakes are meant to be seen by the audience. 

There are many challenges that go into building any kind of set, but this play comes with its own additional set of challenges on top of the usual ones. The main obstacle Lyons, Paulin and Gibson faced during this process was figuring out a way for all the set-specific gags to work. Unfortunately for them, the original script does not have any explanations for how each of the 66 set-specific gags works. 

In the script, gags are stated plainly in parentheses, without any guidance on how to make them happen technically. Gibson says the team behind the original show hunts for how-to guides or explanations online and takes them down. This is usually the case for some gag-heavy shows where the original creators do not want to share their tactics. 

“They don’t say, ‘Oh, here is how everything works!’ They leave it to you to figure it all out,” Lyons says. He talks about a specific moment in the show that contains a magic trick. Sandra, an actress from the visiting theater troupe who plays Florence Colleymoore, suddenly appears from inside a grandfather clock seconds after she is seen trying to get through a door on the other side of the stage. The script simply states that she magically appears, not how she makes it back into the clock beforehand. Luckily, Lyons was able to figure out a way for the magic trick to run smoothly without the audience noticing. However, just like the script notes, a magician never reveals his secret. 

Most other set-specific gags are technical ones that Lyons, Paulin and Gibson have to engineer their way around. The collapsing platform, for example, uses two chain motors supported by three metal structures. It falls in three stages, meaning the platform needs to hold itself and two actors up in the middle stage. “We’ve got to build it strong for it to do it over and over again… every night it has to go back and get fixed again,” Lyons says. Both chain motors are rated at two tons each, and the maximum amount of weight on top of the platform during its fall is about 600 pounds, so there is more than enough power to allow everything to run smoothly.       

They used magnets for props staged to fall off the wall over and over again. However, with heavier props like the shield, they had to find more secure ways to keep it attached to the wall. One of their early prototypes used Velcro to make it easy to pull off the wall, but the shield’s weight was too much for the Velcro to hold onto it. Eventually, they settled on a magnet at the top of the shield with two wooden pieces at the bottom pushed through holes in the wall. This made it so the actor could rip the shield away easily and it could still be placed back each night without too much hassle. This method still left room for some error, though. The rehearsal before opening night resulted in the wood on the back of the shield splitting. Nevertheless, with gags that involve dropping or pulling props off the wall, a little breakage throughout the show is expected. 

Kiana Bjur, the costume designer, also had her own wardrobe-specific gags to figure out. While she says that fewer challenges went into the costuming, Bjurs adds, “The fun things are when you have a challenge that you’re not expecting.”

Those unexpected challenges came to her in the form of duct tape and colorful scarves. Near the end of the play, there is a scene when an actress gets wrapped in duct tape. Bjur's main difficulty with this costume was creating an outfit out of duct tape that looked realistic but was easy to take on and off every night. In her final design of the duct tape costume, Bjur used Velcro in the back so the actress could simply slide it on and off without any trouble. 

The biggest challenge Bjur faced was the scarves that an actor pulls out of his pants. This happens after a sword-fighting scene in which one of the characters pretends to die and pulls out red scarves from his pants to symbolize blood. However, as he keeps pulling the scarves out, they turn different colors and he makes a reference to the famous rainbow scarf trick performed by clowns. Bjur’s hurdle in this gag was finding a way to hide the scarves in the actor’s pants. 

When it comes to costuming, according to Bjur, theater magic is just Velcro. Just like her solution to the duct tape outfit, she used Velcro to attach a tube to the actor's pants where the scarves could hide before he pulled them out. 

Another unique aspect of “The Play That Goes Wrong” is the backstage crew. Usually, the backstage crew is in charge of scene changes and helping actors with makeup and costumes. They work in support of the actors and are not supposed to be seen by the audience. In this play, the backstage crew is a part of the cast. There are 12 cast members, six of them making up the stage crew team.  

Yonika Metellus, junior theater major, plays Annie, a member of the CBU stage crew. She is first seen by the audience as the one in charge of attaching the mantle to the wall, but later on, she is pushed onto the stage by one of the actors to play Florence Colleymoore when Sandra passes out. 

This is Metellus’s first big on-stage appearance at CBU. Before this play, her roles at the Wallace Theatre have been ensemble member, assistant stage manager and stage manager. This means she has had experience being a part of the show, but this is her first time getting to dig into a character. 

In her first scene on stage, Metellus’s character is hesitant and reads off a script. However, as the play continues, Annie discovers a passion within herself and ends up trying to get the recovered Sandra off stage so she can have her own time to shine. Their feud ends with Annie wrapping Sandra in Bjur's specifically crafted duct tape outfit.

“I like comedy, and I like adding crazy to it,” Metellus says. “Lee [Lyons] gives us freedom with our characters… we have that creativity in how we want our characters to act.”

For Lyons, when it comes to directing a farce, blocking the show requires a lot of strategic placement. In theater, blocking is the process in which actors are placed around the stage in order to determine smooth movement and positions within each scene. In a show like this, there are many precise movements that actors need to make for gags to work. 

During rehearsals, Lyons moves pennies around his drawings of the set, each penny having a character’s name on it. With this method, he is able to have them on a drawn floor plan that is to scale and envision where the actors will be, if they are blocking each other or if the set feels unbalanced. As a designer, Lyons focuses on maintaining balance within his productions in order to show the audience the importance of composition and beauty that comes from simply moving people around a stage.

“This is my kind of play, where it’s a farce," Lyons says. "There's people having to be in the exact spot in the exact right time. Some directors let the actors find the movement on their own, but this takes time, and this play raced the clock. When the spring semester began on Jan. 9, they only had five weeks to get everything performance ready before opening night on Feb. 10. 

With “The Play That Goes Wrong” as a farce, it was better for Lyons to set the blocking in advance to ensure that gags could run smoothly without the risk of actors getting in the way and putting themselves at risk. 

“I am just a traffic cop," Lyons explains. "I am putting [actors] where I need [them], and then we add all of the layering of emotion and motivation for moving there later.” 

In the theater, the common refrain among this play's cast and crew was, “Hopefully ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ does not go wrong.” With the number of challenges placed in the way of Lyons and his crew, there were certainly moments of difficulty and problem-solving. But all of that hard work paid off in bringing the show to life on the Wallace Theatre stage. 

Despite those challenges, the show’s run from Feb. 10–18 was successful, and “The Play That Goes Wrong” went absolutely right.