“The Play's the Thing” at New Jersey Repertory Company

Two playwrights spirit away their young protégé for a pleasant stay at an Italian castle. However, there is a big surprise in store for the trio. The young man’s fiancée is ensconced there, but she is not ensconced alone. When the troubled young man overhears his beloved in an impassioned exchange with another, he vows to abandon all work on the group’s latest production. Frantic, the elder playwrights devise a plot to disguise the adulterous rendezvous as a rehearsal from a new work-in-progress. What follows is a riotous barbed satire. Audiences will be party to the unexpected, as the play itself becomes the foil with which theatrical convention and artistic arrogance are skewered and deflated with razor wit and ingenuity