Take a trip back to the post-war era in England with the North Riverside Players’ upcoming production of “See How They Run.”
The troupe will play six shows on Friday and Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons from April 24-26 and May 1-3 at the North Riverside Village Commons, 2401 S. Des Plaines Ave. Tickets are available for purchase online.
“The audience doesn’t need to think. They just go and enjoy and laugh at the zaniness that happens,” director Sam Buonomo told the Landmark. “Very often in life, we get all keyed up with a lot of things in our lives. This is a nice evening where you can just go, enjoy, laugh, and feel really good coming out.”
Buonomo described the three-act play, written in 1943 by Philip King, as a small-town comedy of errors.
“It concerns the crazy happenings in the vicarage on one particular evening and early night,” he said. “The vicar has a wife, a former American actress, and there’s a spinster-type character who is a busybody in the town. Whatever the village notices that the vicar’s wife does, the spinster comes and tells the vicar what happened. She’s always interfering, so to speak.”
When a former acting colleague of the vicar’s wife passes through town and they act out a scene together that the spinster witnesses, things spiral out of control, Buonomo said. He called “See How They Run” his favorite of King’s three plays that feature some of the same characters, all of which he’s directed in the past.
“I find this one to be the funniest. Growing up, I loved ‘I Love Lucy’ and ‘The Lucy Show,’ the comedic action of all of that. This, to me, is like a nod, an homage, to that kind of thing,” he said. “In an ‘I Love Lucy’ episode, things start out normal. There’s a little bit of a complication. She gets crazy. Things get wild and bizarre. Oh my gosh, and bang! At the end, things fall back in place. That’s kind of what happens with the show.”
Buonomo, who is also a board member for the Players, said he presented the show to the group’s play-reading committee because the troupe had not performed a comedy or farce in some time. Its most recent productions include “Jekyll and Hyde” last fall, “Steel Magnolias” last spring and “The Wedding Singer” in fall 2024.
“We’ve been around for a long time, and we really started with musicals, but as we got into the other straight shows, we try to rotate around and through them,” he said. “We rotate through, trying to keep our audience flexible with what we’re showing.”
Buonomo said the entire troupe is preparing for an intense tech week leading up to opening night.
“North Riverside Recreation has been incredibly helpful with us, but we’re only in there one week before we open,” he said. “We have to build a set, get it all together, paint it, whatever, and rehearse within one week, and then we open.”
So far, the actors have rehearsed in various spots, from another room in the village commons to space inside Mater Christi Catholic Church, he said.
“That’s where the difficulty comes in. You’re setting up chairs and stuff to present, ‘OK, this is where a doorway would be,’” he said. “As a pitfall for rehearsal, the actors don’t really get to see their physical space until one week before [the show].”
Despite the challenges, Buonomo said his ensemble cast of nine has managed to find the depth in their own characters.
“The actors are really bringing the characters to life. They’re enjoying themselves, and they’ll question me, like, ‘What do you think she would be thinking here?’” he said.
Of course, Buonomo is also looking forward to seeing the audience’s feedback once the show opens.
“I can’t wait to have them get the reaction from the audience for the laughter and the applause of the funny things that they’re doing on stage,” he said. “I’m most looking forward to the actors realizing, ‘Oh my gosh, somebody is really enjoying what I’m doing.’”
