The device of a “play within a play” is hardly new, of course. Theater has always been meta. A Midsummer Night’s Dream incorporates Pyramus and Thisbe, and Hamlet directs a loaded performance of The Mousetrap. Cyrano berates a ham actor, Montfleury. Actors love finding excuses to overact, and portraying a bad actor is terrific justification. As I watched Play On! at Olympia Little Theatre, I was reminded of a show I helped stage, Amateurs by Tom Griffin (1991), in which a community theater group frets over the reaction from a feared critic to its latest production. Most of all, I was reminded of Michael Frayn’s beloved Noises Off — and if you’ve ever seen that show on stage or video, I promise you will be, too.

Consider: Noises Off is a three-act comedy in which hapless actors struggle to ready a show for opening night just a few days away. There are romantic entanglements, missed cues and desperate improvisations when the show goes tits-up. The funniest act by far is the third, in which the actors hobble through that dreaded first public performance. Play On! has an identical outline. Noises Off is unquestionably a better script, so if OLT wanted to stage Noises Off, I wondered, why not just stage Noises Off? My wife answered sensibly, “Noises Off breaks actors.” That’s true. The set of Play On! is far simpler to construct, and there are no falls down stairs. Incidentally, the joke’s on me: It turns out Play On! debuted two years before Noises Off.

The challenge of playing a bad actor is that the joke only works if you’re clearly a good actor. A few of OLT’s ensemble fare better than the rest. Matt Garry is funny as snide amateur thespian Saul, and John Pratt, Carol Richmond and Amanda Wagaman find subtle nuances. Kendra Malm is well-cast as an indecisive playwright. Julia VanDerslice’s appearance as an overworked stage manager is a clever inside joke (she stage managed many of OLT’s recent efforts). Overall, though, Play On! struggles for laughs until its stammering final act; even then we’re never sure whether the line glitches were planned. I suppose that’s a compliment.

Play On!

Through June 26, 7:55 p.m. Thursday-Saturday
1:55 p.m. Sunday, $10-$12
Olympia Little Theatre, 1725 Miller Ave. NE, Olympia
360.786.9484