It’s about time – or at least timing.
“The jokes have to be paced just right,” said Moore of Olympia. “The timing is just like clockwork. That’s what I hear when I read the script.”
The broad farce, set in 1980, is about a man visited by the worst house guest imaginable – the nerd of the title.
It’s like a sitcom in that it begins with a silly premise that builds into a serious situation. The host is too polite to kick the nerdy guest out and is looking for some way to get rid of him.
Moore often acts in the company’s productions, but he said of this one: “I knew if I were in it, I wouldn’t be able to keep my mouth shut. Being an actor, you can only control one performance.”
The play was written by Larry Shue, who wrote only a few plays before he died in a plane crash in 1985.
“He has a wonderful sense of comedy,” Moore said. “He doesn’t waste any moments. He doesn’t pad anything. There’s no moment where you say, ‘This should have been left on the cutting-room floor.’”
“He is a huge community-theater playwright,” said Toni Holm, Olympia Little Theatre’s secretary. The theater did Shue’s “The Foreigner” several years ago, and Moore acted in that production.
But Moore’s familiarity with Shue goes back a lot further than that.
“Twenty years ago, in high school, I did a cutting from this play at a state theater festival,” he said, “but it was only about 20 minutes of the show. I’ve had a love affair with the play ever since.
“It’s one of the funniest scripts I’ve ever read.”
Moore is finding directing to be a huge challenge, although he’s thrilled with his cast.
“I’ve picked some very good people, very funny people,” he said. “That’s 90 percent of directing, in my experience so far.”
The director is having fun with the setting of the play.
“I never thought that I would see the day that a play set in 1980 would be considered a period piece,” he said.
But because the plot revolves around an answering machine, and because the main character is an architect who works at a drawing board and creates watercolors of his projects, moving it to the present wouldn’t have worked.
The costumes include a pair of “Mork & Mindy”-inspired rainbow suspenders, and the sets also have that “Back to the Future” feeling.
“We’ve made mail with 15-cent stamps,” Moore said. “We’ve made a Nixon-Agnew bumper sticker.
“And we had to find an answering machine, which these days is not easy.”
