Love For Love

William Congreve's Love For Love is an elegantly seditious play. Amidst all its comic intricacies and balanced construction are some just plain nasty cracks. "Honor is a public enemy, conscience, a domestic thief," we are told, and we shouldn't be too comfortable about the situation. At the play's end true love is rewarded, and the greed, lechery and feigning of feeling which have been smirked at as the keystones of Congreve's society are taken almost seriously and punished. Righteous sons rebuke their fathers and everybody does a curtain frug.

Or at least at the Charles Playhouse they do. Director Michael Murray has taken this classic comedy with a moral bite and played it for broad laughter. Which it gets and deserves. But Murray and his actors (and for that matter, his designer, William Roberts) sometimes push too hard; the humor becomes heavy, and the moral sharpness disappears.

These lapses into the obvious are far enough apart not to prevent the production from being a fast-moving, funny play. But they are powerful enough to shut up the still, small voice of conscience underneath the dialogue.

The technical sides of the production mirror the best and worst features of the acting. The incidental music syncopates Bach flute sonatas with jazz instrumentation a la Swingle Singers. Mixed with Roberts' brightly patterned sets and costumes (Charles Keating plays Valentine's feigned mad scene in a giant purple paisley robe and a huge hat like the top of a party favor), the music induces a pleasurable sense of swingingly elegant decadence.

But things go too far. Roberts has a penchant for jarring a hideous orange and a vile pink together. Everywhere. Orange chairs with pink seats. Pink and orange wall patterns. It's painful.

Similarly, little directorial bits usually come off beautifully, but occasionally become heavy-handed. Gwyllum Evans as Sir Sampson, the father who seeks to disinherit Valentine, lifts a corner of his wig to hear what's going on. Jill Clayburgh as the naive, ardent, immense Miss Prue takes ten minutes to stuff a giant hankerchief into her bosom.

But Murray also has a rather tiresome preoccupation with feet. There are about fifteen too many kicks in the shin, foot-stamping or foot-smelling routines in the show.

The acting, too, is generally skillful, but occasionally overdone. Edward Zang's cynical Scandal is always restrained yet his open disdain for the slithery lawyer Buckram (Bernard Wurger) is still as funny as anything in the show. Wurger himself smoothly handles a three minute conversation from a blackhatted Puritan lawyer to a shyly drunk self-acknowledged stud. Gerald McGonagill as the addled astrologer Foresight, when calm, is also entertaining.

Those who go too far are generally female, though Eric House's foppish Tattle who always deals with women "who shall remain nameless" and Terrence Currier's shoutingly gruff sailor Ben "who wants a little polishing" have their share of slapstick hysterics. A few players like Dixie Dewitt's drunken Nurse are too raucous-voiced all along, but the general problem is not knowing when to stop. Miss Clayburgh and Mr. House's seduction scene has some deftly staged running around but the audience tires around the half-mile mark.

Congreve's play is hardy, and sporadic overplaying doesn't do it too much damage. But a director should have a little more faith in his playwright. The words of Congreve's comedy can carry themselves and often should. Only Mr. Zang and Mr. Keating as Valentine are consistently sensitive to the proper amount of playing a line demands.

Keating's mad scene is less frantic and more funny than any of the shouting, jumping fits the other characters lapse into. Murray has him carry a birdcage around as a mocking of Diogenes' lantern. Its mere presence is a marvelous touch. Murray, in one of those decisions which saves this production, doesn't have him constantly swing it around.

Keating's self-control is crucial to that part of the moral incisiveness of Love For Love which does come through. As the play's one, unfeigned true lover (excepting his love, Angelica, played by Lucy Martin, unfortunately the most poorly drawn of Congreve's characters) Valentine, though a rake in the past, is now the man free of the life of "continued affectation" which surrounds him. In the last scene, his sincerity and sobriety provide the one dramatic moment of the Charles production which is not just funny. Then everybody starts the frug. Like the show itself, the dance entertains, but it makes Congreve's quiet thrust at meaning pointless. I would have thought the one thing that a repertory company might have learned from modern drama is to take comedy just a little seriously.