‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ is an intentional disaster at the Kennedy Center
The Huffington Post called the original production “the funniest play Broadway has ever seen.”
“The Play That Goes Wrong” enters its final week at the Kennedy Center now through Aug. 13.
“If you want to laugh like you’ve never laughed before, if you want to just walk out of a theater with a sore belly and tears in your eyes, come down and see ‘The Play That Goes Wrong,'” Actor Matt Harrington told WTOP. “You will not regret it. It’s a blast. You’ll laugh, I promise. I promise!”
The sidesplitting show is essentially a play within a play. It’s set on the opening night of an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery called “The Murder at Haversham Manor” that’s being staged by the fictional Cornley University Drama Society, an amateur theater troupe who isn’t equipped to handle the myriad problems that begin to plague the production.
Harrington plays the show’s frustrated director, watching his beloved play fall apart.
“It’s the Murphy’s Law of plays,” Harrington said. “Things go missing, lines get mixed around, things fall apart, the set starts to have issues, and in true slapstick fashion, there might be a couple hits to the head, so people having to sub in. … Between human error, set error and prop error, it creates quite the combination of mishaps.”
According to Harrington, parts of the play “actually involve the audience, where the stagehands are running around the house looking for a lost dog.”
He says he’s not qualified to say whether it is truly the “funniest play ever,” but it’s certainly up there.
“I got to see it before I joined the company and it was one of the funniest plays I’ve ever seen,” Harrington said. “Part of what makes it so funny is these guys who made it are brilliant. … They’re doing different styles of comedy often at the same time or in quick succession. … A bit gets proposed, another bit happens, then the first bit comes back. … They’re able to keep all these balls in the air, then catch one at the right time, so it tickles your brain.”
The play was written in 2012 by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, who all studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art before forming Mischief Theatre Company in West London.
“They’ve gone on to create a franchise,” Harrington said. “They just closed ‘Peter Pan Goes Wrong’ on Broadway, which you can imagine, a similar idea, trying to put on a production of ‘Peter Pan.'”
Harrington said that if you like the show and want to see more like it, “you have plenty to choose from.”
“They’re working on magic that goes wrong, a bank robbery that goes wrong, they have live shows, they’ve got TV shows, they’ve found their calling,” he said of Mischief Theatre Company.