Theatre in Review: 10 out of 12 (Soho Rep)10 out of 12, a funny, imaginative, and thoroughly original comedy about the travails of theatre people, comes roaring to life near the end of the first act, when Thomas Jay Ryan takes the stage as Paul, the most discontented member of a company trying to get through a technical run-through by any means possible. The title is the standard theatre term for such a rehearsal, which is designed to address and fix all technical glitches; it lasts for 12 hours, and, as per union rules, the actors may work for only ten, plus a two-hour break. It is usually a grueling experience, set to a start-and-stop tempo as various bits of staging minutiae are, slowly, painfully worked out. Everyone involved tends to leave dispirited, convinced they are on a sinking ship. It should be added that the play that this company is performing -- a neo-Victorian potboiler with elements of latent homosexuality, sado-masochism, and the supernatural, not to mention a brace of scenes set in the 21st century -- looks alarmingly unpromising. You've heard of the actor's nightmare; Paul is every actor's nightmare, the brilliant, but turbulent, talent who cannot keep his pain to himself and never loses an opportunity to make himself the center of attention. He wanders on stage in scenes featuring other actors, a slow, spectral presence musing over some bit of business or the nature of being or whatever. The director, stopped cold by one of Paul's ill-timed entrances, says, "That isn't your shirt, is it?" Paul, rather pleased with himself, replies, "I purchased this online. It belonged to a duke, of the period. And then I altered it a little. I thought it would be right if the cuffs were filthy." The director, nicely, carefully, but firmly explains that Paul's character, Carstairs, is a natty dresser. With a sweeping gesture, Paul replies, "But do we see him? Do we see him as the world sees him? Or do we see deeper?" You can imagine the effect this has on a company of tired, hungry, and irritated actors and technicians, and it takes all of the director's diplomatic skills to get Paul off the stage and into the shirt the costume designer provided. It's a neatly executed bit of business, but it is Ryan's ability to merely stand there, sending off unspoken signals of tension and discord, that make him the perfect actor for Anne Washburn's play. This is not to suggest that everyone else in Les Waters' company isn't thoroughly skilled at pulling off Washburn's complicated and astonishingly clever conceit. When you enter the theatre, you are given a little radio headset that puts you on the same communications channel as the stage manager and tech team; you listen in as they identify staging problems, take work notes, and generally kibitz on the spectacle unfolding, in halting, hilarious fashion. The interplay of their running commentary -- sometimes pertinent, sometimes riotously trivial and irrelevant -- juxtaposed with all the on-stage fiddling around, provides plenty of merriment. And, as boredom and frustration set in over the glacial pace, everyone's behavior becomes increasingly eccentric. During a long pause, two actresses, outfitted in monstrously large bustles, experimentally try to fit through the set's doorway; a minute later, just for the fun of it, they spin like dervishes. An actress, recoiling from an unexpected cue, says, "That light is too bright. I feel like it is judging me." The director, wounded at the sight of an exit sign that spoils the fade-to-black that opens the show, casually wonders if, at each performance, an intern might possibly wander by and cover it with a black sign -- a suggestion that is cheerfully, and definitively, annulled by the no-nonsense stage manager. And so the struggle continues, with a new roadblock appearing at every turn: The theatre's power supply is such that cooling fans can't be plugged in until the actors' curling irons are turned off; an electric kettle blows out half the light rig. The director hates everything he sees and hears, even as he admits to asking for all of it. A techie cuts his hand on an Exacto knife and, rather than seek medical attention, binds it up with gaffer's tape. The assistant director fawns over Jake, the lone movie name in the cast, pestering him with questions about the size of his six-pack -- before quickly adding the assurance that he isn't gay. And through all the mishaps and false starts and dead ends, the headset chatter continues, about Funyuns, salami sandwiches, and the quality of Wi-Fi in the theatre. ("I can't even get Facebook. You know where it's terrible? Playwrights. Or was it Playwrights? Somewhere I've been recently. MCC?") Lest you think that 10 out of 12 is a backstage farce à la Noises Off, I hasten to add that its pleasures are of the deadpan, oddball variety -- and at a certain point you might begin to wonder, as I did, if the play will ever amount to more than a series of deftly staged and performed throwaway gags. (Admittedly, it does have its longeurs, mostly in the first act.) But if you listen, closely, to both the on-stage action and the running dialogue in one's ear, you pick up bits and pieces of information that lay bare the cross-currents of tension, jealousy, irritation, and fear that underlies everything that happens. It's a prime example of a new style of playwriting -- exemplified by Clare Barron's You Got Older and Bess Wohl's Small Mouth Sounds -- in which we glean details about the characters and their conflicts on the fly as they go about their tasks. It's a tricky business to pull off under the best of circumstances, never mind with the technical challenges imposed here. In a cast in which everyone inhabits his or her character to the hilt, the standouts include Quincy Tyler Bernstine as the stage manager -- cheerful and steely to the last ("It's my job to have an opinion and never express it."); Gibson Frazier, as Ben, an actor who excels at making up little time-passing games during long stage waits; Nina Hellman as Siget, showing tremendous aplomb about being cast as a monstrous hag in a black veil; Sue Jean Kim as Eva, an actress whose neuroses center on the exact placement of a table in her big scene; Bray Poor, the production's sound designer, as the production's sound designer, trapped in an endless series of skirmishes about the duration of each music cue; and David Ross, as cagey, cool Jake, who deflects any oversharing from his colleagues with canned responses. Best of all, there's Ryan as Paul, a lightning rod for all the stray emotions roiling the stage. Although the script doesn't exactly say so, it suggests that Paul's career has seen better days and he is fed up with his lot. (Jake recalls meeting him while playing a dwarf for Richard Foreman (!), and being too star-struck to make conversation.) When Jake, taking a phone call, misses an entrance, Paul takes him apart in front the company, causing Eva to vent her rage at Paul. (Clearly, they have a past.) Paul's slow, humiliated exit following this brutal exchange is nothing less than a marvel of silent revelation. Later, Paul, unhappy with the end of a scene, all but begs the director to let him and the others improvise some new dialogue -- "perhaps two or three pages at the most. On the outside, four." (The playwright is in bed with the flu.) When the director gently reminds him that they are, after all, in tech, the tirade that follows reveals Paul's fury at a lifetime of disappointments and his terror at the soul-destroying effects of mediocrity. This is followed by a quietly stunning speech in which Ben notes that, for all of them, "there will always be a kind of failure" and "we have to find a kind of beauty in that." There's plenty of beauty, too, in David Zinn's purposely unfinished set, complete with a pivoting wall that reveals an eerie green forest backdrop; Ásta Bennie Hostetter's costumes, which neatly contrast jeans and T-shirts with hoop skirts, vests, and cravats; Justin Townsend's lighting, including some memorably muffed cues; and Poor's sound design, especially a funny gag about cicadas, the sound effect without which no production is complete. 10 out of 12 concludes the end of the work day with the company together on stage. Paul, standing apart, recalls, in a voiceover monologue, his early days as an actor, when all the sacrifices and squalor only added excitement to the work. "We knew that this was the best way to live," he says. "Because we believed in what we were doing. Utterly. We believed in ourselves. Utterly. We were heroes of art." Meanwhile, the rest of the company enters into a little dance that is both impromptu and a kind of ritual. It's a moment that combines loss and redemption and renewal, the sort of thing that only heroes of art like Washburn, Waters, and their excellent company could create. -- David Barbour 
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