Rubber Room: Capricious Laughter (continued)

To try to answer the question of how performances of the same play, each with a different set of actors, are different from one another, laughter is one lens through which we can look.

Here are some examples:

Each of the security guards, in his exasperation at why the teachers are not checking in with him at the front door before coming down to the rubber room, lists the reasons for why he might not be there when they arrive. He means to say that he is almost always there.

Only Jacob Callie Moore elects to deliver this list in such a way that it seems so long that it undoes his intention. The audience laughs.

This line of Daytona's gets a laugh every time: "It's a lousy day not to be drinking." Jill Melanie Wirth gets a more sustained laugh when she follows the line by pouring the contents of a miniature bottle of liquor into her coffee cup. This also shows that her interpretation of the character took a bravado risk earlier when, like the other Daytona's, she asks Alan if he wants to check her purse. She was hiding exactly what he was looking for; this fleshes out the character and gives us a glimpse of the kind of risk-taking that contributed to her predicament.

Cecily Benjamin became funnier in each new performance. She got laughs in unexpected places by how she said things. When Alan asks her to be good, she explains that she kind of likes being bad. Every Larissa's delivery of this line did not get a laugh; Cecily's later deliveries got much bigger laughs than her earlier ones.

Abby Lee colored her lines with a certain tone I guess I'd call it in which the preposterousness of the situation causing the words to be said is folded into how the line is delivered, so that each intonation is like an inside joke with the audience and with herself, if you can have an inside joke with yourself. I'd be very interested to know whether this is a technique developed for this character or something she always does in comedic roles.

Kari Swenson Riely's Larissa became more physical as the performances progressed. Her pointed finger and other gestures absent from earlier stagings, underlined her lines and made them funnier. The audience laughed.

John Calvin Kelly's most comedic moments had to do with how he bared his teeth. Trying to win over the Rubber Room occupants after he introduces the fourth entrant, he smiles nervously, he oversmiles, if I can coin a word, to try to make the others complicit in his desire to have them accept Patti as one of themselves. "Okay," he pumps his fist. Something's afoot, and even though the audience does not know what it is, this sudden turn in his character's behavior is funny. We laugh.

There is little room for comedy from the Sinclair character. He derides Larissa's attempts at amateur psychology. Scott Davidson's Sinclair responds without moving from his chair, eliciting laughter before he speaks a word, from the expression on his face. Richard Hoehler's Sinclair stands and approaches Larissa to give mock acknowledgement of her insight. They're different; both are funny.

These are only some examples.