Before the house lights go down at the Dorset Theatre Festival production of The Understudy, the set itself has a chance to destabilize the audience. On the large stage, vertiginously tilting walls are topped by a slanting beam. Perspective is undermined even before a balding, gray-haired man darts onstage with a gun, making his own shooting sound effects. His first words — delivered straight to viewers by an actor playing an actor in an empty Broadway theater — are the beginning of a puzzle. “Oh, it’s not real,” Harry says dismissively of the prop gun he’s been brandishing. And we’re off: What is real in this snappy, hilarious, unpredictable play?
The setting is a rehearsal to prepare an understudy for a role he’ll probably never perform before an audience. The play in question is worth all of Broadway’s production opulence, but its sets and lighting effects are merely surreal background for our story. Two actors and a stage manager have a simple professional job to do, but collaboration won’t be easy. They’re natural enemies, each personifying what another considers most atrocious about theater today.
Roxanne, a stage manager who’s always in control, is thrown for a loop when her long-lost fiancé, who skipped out two weeks before their wedding, shows up as the understudy she must prep. Harry’s a luckless actor whose understudy job leaves him peering at a career he still can’t quite have. Onstage opposite him is the show’s second-billed star, Jake, who will slide into the starring role should Brad, the unseen mega-celebrity, ever have to miss a show. Jake isn’t so much an understudy as a working actor grooming for the next level, but despite his trainer-toned biceps and success in an action film, he is stuck in the shadows with neither big money nor big prestige.
Each arrives as a bundle of competing confidence and insecurity. Roxanne stayed in theater as a stage manager, abandoning her acting career after Harry abandoned her. Jake craves validation through the quality of roles he can land, but what does it say if a guy like Harry could double for him? Harry’s career is sputtering, and one reason is the cultural obsession with film celebrities who now gobble up stage roles as a career afterthought while producing a box-office miracle.
The Understudy spans one rehearsal with a thousand interruptions. All of theater’s delicate mechanics fracture before our eyes as Harry overthinks, Jake demands fidelity to his blocking and Roxanne yells futile instructions to the tech booth. We’re in a play wrapped around a play, and the scenes inside break off almost immediately. Until one takes hold. When it comes to life, the actors begin to play with it and their attention clicks. They’re finally making something.
The play they’re doing could only be a hit on Broadway in an alternate universe, but in this satire that’s the point. A fictional long-lost script by Franz Kafka carries his trademark nightmare of dehumanization into a three-hour meditation on despair. But with A- and B-list celebrities, even gloom can fill seats. Feel free to detect the parallels between Kafka’s dystopia and show business; humiliation, isolation and unseen power infect them both.
The play runs on pure absurdity. With only slivers of the Kafka script performed, we can barely piece together a play that includes both a castle and a trial plus several bananas. The theatrical reality of a grand set fights the unreality of actors stumbling through an abbreviated rehearsal. Above it all, Harry’s job is being paid not to act. An understudy’s paycheck is earned by canceling every other engagement for one that likely never comes.
Playwright Theresa Rebeck has a knack for creating unusual circumstances that force characters to face their shortcomings. Her crackling dialogue mixes wit, big concepts and keen human observation. This show looks at the ugly intersection of art and commerce, including the notion that movie stars are more real than ordinary people.
Playwright Theresa Rebeck has a knack for creating unusual circumstances that force characters to face their shortcomings.
Rebeck is Dorset’s resident playwright, and she’s updated her 2008 hit play to fit current times. The Understudy still floats in a make-believe Broadway, where an easy joke about a tech’s incompetence is both off and oft-repeated and eavesdropping seems to be the point of going offstage. Rebeck’s story is so polished it gleams, though its depth is in the wordplay, not the characters. It’s the laughs that linger. As a director, Rebeck demonstrates a brilliant attention to rhythm and space.
As Harry, Jeffrey Bean turns the opening scene into a combination character revelation and killer standup. Bean plays Harry as the most regular of regular guys, summing up an action film as people yelling, “Get in the truck!” He gives us a Harry yearning to act — and yearning to stay cool about it.
W. Tré Davis has just the right swagger to play Jake, an actor still discovering his own star power. Davis’ physicality gives Jake action-film cred, while his open concentration exerts a gravitational pull on other actors to draw them close in a scene.
Elizabeth Heflin plays Roxanne as someone born to solve problems and very weary of her success at it. She’s got a headset and clipboard, but none of it helps when Harry arrives to dig up the past and Jake tempts her toward a future.
The Understudy contrasts acting skill with acting success, and its cynical conclusion is that audiences love fame more than meaning. But it’s also a love letter to theater in which the nature of a play as play sweeps everyone up, including the audience. Rebeck wraps multiple layers of stage artifice and truth around wonderfully funny characters. Showbiz may oppress them, but it can’t quite stop them from wanting to pretend. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Between the Lines | Theater review: The Understudy, Dorset Theatre Festival”
This article appears in July 15 • 2026.
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