Review: Inspired by True Events Depicts the Backstage Drama at a Community Theater

Bring your whole self to work is a cliché that has been embraced by HR departments across America — but does anyone genuinely buy into it? Who actually wants to see their colleague’s whole self peering out at them from the mini fridge, every questionable dietary choice and personality disorder stinking up the claustrophobic workspace?

Ryan Spahn takes those questions to an extreme in Inspired by True Events, his intimate backstage drama, now making its world premiere with Out of the Box Theatrics at the company’s new digs at 154 Christopher Street. The play is artfully staged and masterfully acted, which somewhat compensates for a script that lacks a satisfying shape. It’s not so much a roller coaster ride as it is a drop tower — a quick ascent and terrifying plunge, with a lot of waiting around before we get there.

Director Knud Adams places the audience in an actual green room, where we first encounter Mary (Dana Scurlock), the resident stage manager of a community theater in Rochester, New York. She silently cleans up the wreckage of opening night, tossing pizza boxes and sorting empty liquor bottles like the indulgent house mother of a fraternity. The aroma of brewing coffee rouses Colin (Jack DiFalco), one the of three actors in the current production, who is already at the theater following a night of overindulgence.

Chemically imbalanced on the best of days, Colin is feeling especially low, revealing to Mary that he broke up with his girlfriend the night before. Now he must perform for a sold-out house thanks to a harvest of rave reviews.

Colin’s biggest problem isn’t that he’s hungover. Something terrible happened last night and his castmates, Eileen (Mallory Portnoy) and Robert (Lou Liberatore), won’t discover the true extent of it until he is onstage — at which point, Mary makes the executive decision to go on with the show.

Don’t expect Noises Off. Humor runs through Spahn’s script, but it’s the kind that provokes darkly knowing chuckles rather than full-on belly laughs. While Spahn seems to have written an entire play within the play, which we can see and occasionally hear on a monitor hanging at the side of the mirror, the interplay between the onstage and backstage action never produces the kind of friction that might spark a dramatic fire. Obstacles to the show making it to curtain call are quickly overcome, with no new challenges beyond the substantial central one arising during the 90-minute runtime.

But the performances still make us laugh, especially Portnoy’s effortlessly self-involved Eileen, who has a talent for making delusional statements as if she were observing the weather. Anyone who has ever hung out backstage at a theater will instantly recognize her type.

Liberatore also receives his fair share of laughs as Robert, the first of which comes from the hideous toupée he enters wearing, which we are told is also the subject of the show’s one negative critique (Eileen thoughtfully blacked it out for the lobby display). Liberatore’s restrained facial expressions in response to Eileen’s nonsense reveal a seasoned pro, one who understands that less is often more when it comes to comedy.

Scurlock undoubtedly has the most impressive poker face, keeping us guessing about Mary’s feelings and intentions up to the very end. She seems to have a genuine, almost irrational affection for Colin, a former roommate whom she has known since he was born. But will this interfere with her professional duties? The performance of calm and competence is the Stage Manager’s greatest weapon, and we discover that Mary is, in fact, the most gifted actor in the whole company.

But the award for heaving, sobbing, tremoring dramatics goes to DiFalco, who gives a frighteningly close-up performance of a man who has reached a dead end and is seriously considering smashing his head against the maze wall. His highs are the highest and his lows are the lowest, making us understand why Colin is such a praised actor but also a volatile human being.

As he did with the ensemble casts of English and Primary Trust, Adams makes these very different actors inhabit the same world, so we never question that we are invisible observers in this Rochester green room. Scenic designer Lindsay G. Fuori draws out the authentic wear and tear of the space, while sound designer Peter Mills Weiss makes us hear the mice running through the walls. Siena Zoë Allen’s costumes and Paige Seber’s lighting reinforce Adams’s hyper-realistic staging, while Sean Frank’s magnificently creepy prop design inserts an element of horror into the mundane, causing the hairs to raise on the back of my neck even thinking about it.

The thrills and chills of Inspired by True Events are short-lived, however. When done as well as it is here, stage realism is impressive. But without a truly dynamic story, it is just that.