Ken Michels knew he was never going to be a leading man. So he took his career in a different direction, using his body as a comedic theatrical instrument.
“There’s something about slapstick that I enjoy. It’s the everyman trying to overcome the problem. And just when he thinks he has, it gets worse,” he said.
As a performer, Michels took his cue from Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Donald O’Connor, and Bill Irwin, all actors he could watch again and again without ceasing to laugh.
Dick Van Dyke, he said, could turn tripping over an ottoman at the start of his show into a weekly comedic ballet.
Hysterical, cringe-inducing-in-the-best-possible way bodily mishaps are what occur relentlessly in the iconic play-within-a-play “Noises Off,” opening tonight at Bainbridge Performing Arts.
Since seamless physical comedy lies at the heart of the farce’s success, director Teresa Thuman brought in Michels to act as a movement coach, one who could guide the cast through paces that by opening, would give way to fluid, second-nature slapstick.
That fluidity is crucial to the success of the show, because “Noises Off” is a play about pratfalls, both physical and metaphorical. In it, fraying director Lloyd attempts to carry his hapless, romantically entangled cast through rehearsals and performances of a horrible sex comedy, “Nothing On.” The three acts of “Noises Off” each show a performance of “Nothing On’s” first act, two of them taking place in front of the curtain and one behind it.
Disaster ensues, Michels said, as this “nice, British farce” becomes a reality farce.
“You’ve flushed the toilet and it’s going down the drain,” he said.
Michels’ training in physical comedy is eclectic – he calls it “weird” – with coast-to-coast study in children’s theater in 1970s Seattle, followed by training with mime legend Richard Morse in New York in the 1980s, followed by more training at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.
Returning to the Puget Sound, he workshopped with Bill Irwin and the Pickle Family Circus at the Seattle Rep and worked with Kitsap’s Mountaineer Players as well as other regional theaters. He was “a guy who comes in and helps.”
“Somebody says, look, just come make it funny,” Michels said. “And I say, I’ll try.”
He and Thuman have worked together both at BPA and at Thuman’s Sound Theatre Company. His last work on Bainbridge was in 2005 with “Little Shop of Horrors,” for which he provided the plants – he owns a set constructed specifically for that show that he regularly loans and rents to area theater companies. When Seattle’s ACT staged the Northwest premier of the hit musical in 1987, he really wanted to be a plant. He made do instead with operating them, and instructing other actors.
“I showed them the ropes, or showed them the vines, I should say.”
Michel said Thuman’s production of “Noises Off” was “90 percent there” by the time he started attending rehearsals. So he viewed his job as mostly to help the actors take various bits of blocking and business to the next level, immerse themselves in the music of physicality, and become proficient at patting their heads while rubbing their tummies.
Michels has found that the cast has been immensely receptive – Thuman, he said, has a knack for casting the right people. This crew absolutely gets his core idea that you don’t block a comedy bit just because you think it’ll make people laugh. Instead, you figure out what makes sense for the characters, and for the scene, and let the bits develop organically from there.
“The more fluid it is, the more comfortable it becomes to the audience,” he said. “And then you can stick ’em with the awkwardness.”
Trip ‘Off’ the tongue
“Noises Off” runs Feb. 6-22, with shows at 7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday and 3 p.m. Sundays. Tickets, are at www.bainbridgeperformingarts.org.
