For Kai Heath, What’s “Wrong” is Completely Right
Kai Heath breaks down the art of getting things wrong in the uproarious "The Play That Goes Wrong" at the Kennedy Center.
A million little things have to go right at any given performance of The Play That Goes Wrong for the hilariously crowd-pleasing farce to fall to pieces with precision.
The show’s perfect storm of mishaps that bedevil a college drama society production of an old-fashioned murder mystery requires spot-on timing and physical readiness from its game cast.
In the Mischief Theatre touring company currently bringing down the house at the Kennedy Center, that cast includes Harlem native Kai Heath, who portrays Annie, the overtaxed stage manager for The Murder at Haversham Manor, the play within the play.
Anni is also, according to the cheeky Playbill within the Playbill, “the unsung hero of the Society.” She’s designed, built, painted, stage-managed, and costumed every drama society production for the last three years. So she’s responsible for all those Haversham Manor sets, props, decor, and costumes that go completely, madly haywire.
Some might say, then, that Annie is to blame for a lot of what goes wrong in The Play That Goes Wrong. Is she a secret saboteur?
“I’ve yet to hear that viewpoint,” says Heath, with a laugh, though she’s serious about standing up for her character. “This particular Annie — the Annie that is played by moi — I believe is coming in kind of last-minute.”
As Heath attests, and as anyone who’s seen the play, written by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields and directed by Matt DiCarlo, would agree, Annie is most definitely a team player.
“[She] pops right on in to be a part of the team to complete the story,” says Heath. “This [show] was a last-minute thing for Annie, just trying to meet some last-minute requirement, pick up a little job, but it ends up requiring a lot more of her than what she expected.”
The only cast member who hadn’t done the show before this run, Heath can relate to the team spirit, noting that she feels like a rookie among all-stars. “In a way, I feel in such safe hands,” she says. “But [I’m] also like, ‘Hope I don’t mess up what you guys got going, that’s got you winning all these championships.'”
There wasn’t much time to get up to championship speed, with Heath afforded just two weeks of rehearsal. “When someone from the cast was like, ‘Normally I have five weeks.’ I was like, ‘Whoa!’ That does make me feel like I’m not going so crazy.”
Judging by the extremely funny onstage results, she’s clearly hit her stride. “The first week [of rehearsal], it was myself and the understudies, just so I could learn my way around the set,” says Heath, who started working with the rest of the cast in week two of rehearsal. That was the first of two key pieces to cracking the code of going wrong, she recalls.
The final piece, of course, was the audience.
“Because they’re just so much,” Heath marvels. “The audience response is fueling what I’m doing, particularly for Annie. So yeah, those are the two big missing pieces that when they finally came, made me feel like, ‘Okay, I think I got this? I think I got it.'”
The Play That Goes Wrong runs through August 13, in the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater. Tickets are $39 to $159. Call 202-467-4600, or visit www.kennedy-center.org.
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