I’d like to think this Buster Keaton short, co-written and co-directed with Edward F. Cline, was an influence on The Muppet Show. The Play House is not only full of backstage hijinks—including a bit where Keaton pretends to be a chimpanzee and delivers perhaps the most effusive facial expression of his career—but there’s also a pair of grumpy old men in the audience. (Both being amputees, they need to work together to offer applause and they don’t always agree on what’s worth applauding.) At the start, there’s an extended dream sequence involving numerous Keatons, often on the screen at the same time, as both audience members and performers (all achieved via the in-camera effect of multiple exposure). As multiple Keatons frantically play in the pit orchestra, struggling to keep up and damaging their instruments, The Play House might register to modern audiences as a parable about the existential angst of multitasking. More grotesquely stuck in its own time is the short’s instances of blackface—a staple of the vaudeville scene Keaton grew up working in that was carried over onto the big screen.
(2/22/2022)
