Until WJ S*T*A*G*E decided to perform “Noises Off” as its fall play, I had never heard of it, and being the thespian I am, it sounded like a great idea to attend this mystery of a play. So, on Nov. 9, I bought my ticket and attended the opening night performance of “Noises Off,” which turned out to be a great idea.

“Noises Off” is a play within a play. It follows the story of nine characters, all of which are involved in the production of “Nothing On,” a project which involves a lot of crying, yelling and Selsdon. You’ll have to see it to know who Selsdon is.

The plot follows all of these crazy relationships and quirky characters, on and off the stage, since the entire play consists of them performing a play, whether it be the first act, where they’re just rehearsing, the second act, where they perform a matinee and the actual audience sees all the slapstick drama backstage or the third act, in which the real audience sees the disaster of a play that “Nothing On” has become.

As an audience member watching this, one can only marvel at how well the actual play of “Noises Off’ was put on. The acting was superb and the blocking was incredible. The actors and actresses needed to have blocking for the fake play and for the entire slapstick aspect to work. The second act alone was an incredible instance of blocking, with the only dialogue being offstage and the audience seeing what went on “backstage” when the actors weren’t performing. The entire act, after the introduction to the play and the occasional scripted yells, was completely slapstick and amazingly blocked. Every time something happened that would affect, anger or draw any emotion out of another character, the character just happened to finish their scene and appear just in time to see it. Everything was executed so amazingly that even scripted mistakes were believable.

Another amazing thing about the actors and actresses who preformed this was their roles. They weren’t Robin Hood or Jean Valjean, they were actors and actresses playing actors and actresses playing actors and actresses. As confusing or easy as it sounds to play someone with a great relation to oneself, I can tell you from experience it is incredibly hard to play someone so normal. The fact that the cast was able to pull it off was remarkable.

I would like to send a shout out to Bradley Stein and Coty Novak, for playing people that are compete opposites their personalities, while also having so much in common with their characters. I’m still amazed that this was only a high school production. In all, I would rate this play a 9.9 out of ten because nothing is perfect, but, by the power invested in this critic, it was close to it.