WILMINGTON — From the audience, you can barely see a string of fishing line linking one end of the set to the other, though it’s a throughline for one of the many gags that travel through the three carriages of Opera House Theatre Company’s version of the Varsity Line.
The railway line, which connected English university cities of Oxford and Cambridge in the 19th and 20th centuries, was the jumping off point for Mack Webb’s original comedic play titled “The Varsity Line,” which opens Friday.
Circa 1938, the farce follows the antics of the train’s passengers, as they learn a safe full of money is among them, along with at least one train robber.
The play’s structure follows the events in three separate rail cars over the same 20-minute period; some of the jokes are essentially in reverse, meaning audiences may not understand the humor until the third installment. Some items turn up one moment with no explanation until the subsequent scene.
The aforementioned gag — no spoilers — speaks to the classic film set-rigging that Mack knew his father, Bo Webb, would bring to the table as the play’s director. Webb has a long Wilmington-based resume — director of several films, camera operator on shows like “Outer Banks” and “The Summer I Turned Pretty” and co-founder of Twinkle Doon, the collective behind the establishment of the Cucalorus Film Festival. “The Varsity Line” will be his first theatrical production.
“He brings all this know-how and expertise and skill that you know somebody with my level of experience making this stuff could only dream of, and so he’s not only an excellent partner, but a great resource,” Mack told Port City Daily.
Having collaborated with his son on short films, Bo said another partnership was a no-brainer and because of their close relationship, the two Webbs have gone back and forth refining jokes, adding comedic bits based on casting and working out kinks in the story. Mack said the process of “poking holes” in his script, which he wrote over the course of his semester in a New York playwriting workshop, was his favorite part of writing.
Bo said he and Mack have added nods to more modern humor, increasingly shaped by internet memes and social media discourse that one has to be “chronically online” to understand. In that sense, it’s an unpredictable move for a young playwright to choose to write a piece more in line with “The Importance of Being Earnest” and Golden-era screwball comedies.
Mack told Port City Daily he was inspired by more modern pillars of the genre, such as the beloved 1980 spoof “Airplane!”
“I just thought that the Varsity Line represented such an interesting time in history when the modern was clashing with this, like this vision that I have of old England — it’s like “Monty Python” on a train,” Mack said.
Unlike the movies with its editing and special effects, the comedy of “The Varsity Line” rises and falls with its actors, though the cast had about a month of rehearsals to prepare.
“It’s been really fun to work with actors over a longer period of time than I would on a film,” Bo said. “Very few films have rehearsal periods. Usually you rehearse a scene in the morning, and then you shoot it right after, and then you’re done.”
Bo also enlisted many actors he had previously worked with, including Jon Stafford, who plays aging lecturer R.A. Butler and Sam Robison, who has several quick changes from Detective Bouvier Duvall to a constable. From his short film work, Tyler Patrick Smith has been pulled in to play train porter William; Jake Brenden Taylor plays Edgar, his older brother and fellow employee.
Ed Wagenseller is also returning to the stage after retiring from his faculty position at UNCW’s Department of Theatre, where he directed many a farce at UNCW’s Department of Theatre.
Wagenseller told Port City Daily it’s been since 2018 when he was just able to focus on his role onstage.
“It’s fun to just act again,” he said. “I laugh with some of my fellow castmates when they’re trying to figure out how to get something to work that I’m not a part of and I go — that’s your problem, I’m just an actor.”
Though now that he’s participating instead of watching from the outside the proscenium, he said he has a lot more empathy for his former students he directed.
“I was like: ‘What is so hard about this?’ Oh, we have to remember words, too,” Wagenseller said.
One of those former students is Reilly Callaghan, who plays Declan, one half of a sibling pairing returning from their mother’s funeral; Chloe Moore plays his counterpart, Daisy.
“One of the first plays I’ve ever done was “Boeing Boeing” which was a complete farce, so I love the style of play,” Callaghan said. “It’s so fast paced, it just keeps going. I think the thing that’s sad about it is that you’re in it and then you’re like “Oh, I’m done, it’s over.’”
Callaghan said it’s been especially fun to play Declan, a character who in the midst of jokes and silliness, fails to grasp the humor.
“I’m pretending to be a human as Declan, which is funny,” Callaghan said.
Almost everyone in the cast cited the biggest challenges as word memorization and accent perfection. Though Jennifer Frankel, who plays Jeanette Brigsby, noted the physicality took some attention.
“Realizing that amidst all of this, this, you know, these scenes in this action, we’re also actively on a train, so we have to keep our bodies behaving as if we’re actually traveling,” Frankel said.
Monday was the first rehearsal in costume and in the constructed train car, the beginning of “tech week” where all the lighting, set and costume pieces come together for fine-tuning. The run-through had a lot of stops and starts, spilled drinks, mistimed sound cues; while the script includes one character losing their pants, another was struggling to keep his up throughout Monday’s rehearsal. The fishing line bit had yet to fully work.
Yet, the cast took it in stride and their persistence, despite accidents, one could argue, made the action funnier.
That’s not to say the play is entirely screwball; one scene pits two characters together to opine about the past and reversing time. The play’s characters are hurtling toward a new era, bridging old world England’s sensibilities with the Varsity Line’s new diesel engine and articulated cars, implemented in 1938. A year later, the county would be subsumed into World War II, which ultimately delayed the progression of the new engine to other areas while the Varsity Line was used for war efforts.
“I think that is the beauty of something that’s artistically powerful, something that you can watch and laugh, but if you think about it, there’s still layers behind it,” Taylor said.
“The Varsity Line” will be staged at Thalian Hall’s Red Box Theater May 1-9; Friday showtimes are at 7:30 p.m., Saturdays are 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. and the Sunday showing is at 3 p.m.
Reach journalist Brenna Flanagan at [email protected].
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