'23rd Floor' Guarantees Laughs

­There’s a promising show in the works for fans of humor. “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” produced by the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club and The Office for the Arts, is a comedy about comedy. Directed by Boyd I.R. Hampton ’16, the play premieres Oct. 17 at the Loeb Experimental Theater.

“Laughter on the 23rd Floor” follows the writing staff of a comedy show in the 1950s at the height of McCarthyism. As the characters struggle to adjust to a changing audience, they also try to craft the funniest material possible for the show in order to impress the production’s star, Max Prince (Dylan J. Peterson ’17). Prince, a so-called “fallen giant” of comedy, worries that an increasingly Midwestern audience is driving down the quality of the show while also harboring fears of becoming a victim of McCarthyism.

“Laughter” is a comedy marked by more somber discussion. “The stakes are actually higher than a drama…when you’re dealing with something like political censorship,” Hampton says.  Making light of subtle ideas of censorship and xenophobia is no easy task, but Peterson thinks “Laughter” is well-suited for the challenge. “There’s something funny, in a sick sense, about the fall of someone,” Peterson says.

Despite the more serious themes in “Laughter,” the production’s comedy is of the lighter brand. “My primary focus is always to make the audience laugh,” Hampton says. The play’s actors are enthusiastic about the cast’s chemistry, maintaining that it is one of the show’s main strengths and the key reason for its comedic success. “The way our ensemble works together is really fantastic,” actor Thomas W. Peterson ’18 says .

And for anyone still deciding whether or not to attend the play, consider one what Hampton calls one of “Laughter”’s defining characteristics what Hampton calls one of “Laughter”’s: “Almost all of the characters end up bent over a table at some point, in one way or another.”