Little did Hungarian Ferenc Molnar know in 1920, when he wrote “Játék a Kastélyba” (Play at the Castle), that it would be the basis for plays that would be making audiences laugh over 100 years later, first in P.G. Wodehouse’s 1924 adaptation, The Play’s the Thing (riffing off Shakespeare), later in Tom Stoppard’s 1984 Rough Crossing, and, most recently in Paul Slade Smith’s The Angel Next Door.
The current production is a nice, fun farewell, as Northlight’s last one before moving to its new castle in the fall. As mentioned in the dialogue, sometimes a couple hours of escapist humor is just what the doctor, or audience, ordered.
The show is a particular treat for people who enjoy theater about theater, complete with an inside joke referencing a 1920 Hungarian play (hmm) and recurring jokes about breaking the fourth wall, though not really, but also is reliant on the relationships between husband and wife playwrights, an actress and her lothario co-actor (as in Lothario, a character in Nicholas Rowe’s 1703 play The Fair Penitent) and the same actress and her would-be suitor, a novelist, whose book the playwrights have adapted for a play, not this one (that might be too much).
But, as good as all those actors were (the real ones, not the ones they were playing), the show is stolen, and at least partly handed to thanks to the script, as comedies often are, by a “secondary’ character, namely the maid, Olga, played in a tour-de-force turn by Erin Grennan, who, in real life, is married to the playwright Paul Slade Smith, which seems only right, as one of the male leads (the play’s playwright) is played by Sean Fortunato, who is married to the play’s director Linda Fortunato.