Taking Up a Coward's Gauntlet

Private Lives has an exotic origin, an erotic icing, and a moronic plot which forces director Peter D. Arnott and his chief actors, William Franklin Hutson and Jan Lewis, to scramble desperately to salvage a basically nebbish play. Noel Coward, the first English playwright to introduce Henry Ford's assembly line production techniques to theater, wrote the comedy in 1930 while in Shanghai seemingly to pose a challenge: Who could take his featherweight literary sedative about marriage and sex in English high society and transform it into an exciting and riotous evening's entertainment? The Tufts Summer Theater company, as an exercise in dramatic machismo, has taken up the gauntlet, but to what avail?

Coward's Lives is organized in an unusual and precarious manner for a situation comedy: a threadbare plot is sprinkled with "life-lines" (guffaw-inducing one-liners) for the major characters, Elyot Chase and Amanda Prynne, and occassional emergency appearances of the play's idiotic and insufferable secondary characters (Victor Prynne, Sybil Chase, and Louise). The first act introduces the entire plot: Amanda and Elyot, once married and later divorced, fall in love again while honeymooning with their newly found spouses, Victor and Sybil--two cretin-like characters representing the very best in English shallowness. There is no further development of plot after act one, there is no major physical action beyond a brief lover's fight in the second. The director and the actors must build all the visual and verbal humor upon the nearly barren skeleton of the script and, at each performance, the actors must keenly tune the pace and style to suit the particular audience in order to thwart that "first sinister cough of boredom," as Sir Noel so aptly put it. At the Tufts Arena Theater, on Friday night at least, no one coughed.

Arnott, in order to squeeze the maximum wit out of Coward's insipid manuscript, has worked out what appears to be a second-by-second computer program for verbal inflections, facial contortions, physical maneuvers, and furniture kicking. During the extensive arguments and love bouts of Elyot and Amanda, the play's spirited and engaging cynics, the precise sense of timing turns insults, cigarette lighting, and record smashing into high comic art. At times, Arnott's exhaustive direction and his actors' slavish execution reaches self-parody: it is worthwhile, during the course of the play, to study carefully the director's Bolshoi ballet of sitting, resettling, and rising from different geometric surfaces.

Noel Coward himself acted in the London production of Private Lives is the 1930's (as Elyot), and he found it a trying, though successful, experience: "It was more tricky and full of pitfalls than anything I have ever attempted as an actor." Hutson and Lewis, as Elyot and Amanda, are a sharp, strong, and attractive duo who avoid most of Coward's worst pitfalls--abysmal dialogue, kitschy scenes, and trite psychology--and maximize Coward's well hidden strengths--the parody of English manners and social institutions, the art of verbal thrust and counterthrust, the sharp criticism of women's roles in society. Consider a typical Coward "life-line": "If there's one thing in the world that infuriates me, it's sheer wanton stubbornness. I should like to cut off your head with a meat axe." Without Jan Lewis's acid-coated delivery and Hutson's wry cool on stage, Coward's play would never escape the quagmire it so richly deserves. Mark Swiney, Carla Dragoni, and Patsy Culbert portray brilliantly the assorted pathologies of organic brain damage, a chronic symptom of Coward's background characters.

For those suffering from a deep seated nostalgia for the furniture, music, and clothing of the 1930's, the technical staff (David Sackeroff and Mary Harkins) has outdone itself with the assistance of several of Boston's antique stores and collectors. The uncluttered sets, a French summer hotel terrace and a Paris flat, are well-designed, lighted, and integrated into the Tufts theater-in-the-round. The sets' simple, though exactingly realistic, design coupled with the constant turning and motion of the actors take maximum advantage of the theater's comfortable environment. The props were perhaps too realistic: at the play's conclusion, a small group of alcohol-starved theater-goers rushed onstage to sample the cognac used in the final scene.

The audience for the play was postgraduate, middle-aged, and middle-browed--people interested in the 1930's and 1940's of their joyous youths devoid of all those sticky, irritating events occurring on the Continent. If this is your perspective, go and, once there, find out if the cognac is real.