Fashions come and go, nations rise and fall, and still Noel Coward's Private Lives remains one of the most delightful confections in the modern repertory.
Five hundred years from now, when we're all living in a glass bubble on Mars, testy Elyot will still be saying, "Don't quibble, Sibyl," and Amanda will still be breaking a phonograph record over her lover's head. This comedy is built to last.
The likable production currently being offered by Stageworks captures most of the play's strengths: its glamour, its sophistication, its wonderfully rhythmic dialogue and its core assertion that you can't live with lovers and you can't live without 'em. On R.T. Williams' realistic set, representing the terrace outside two posh French hotel rooms, four talented actors — Larry Buzzeo, Midge Mamatas, Barbara Eaker and John Chaplin — engagingly argue that all relationships are love/hate relationships, and that the distance from one passion to its opposite is a mere millimeter.
The story it tells is about Victor and Amanda, two British newlyweds who come to a French hotel on their honeymoon, and discover that Amanda's first husband Elyot is in the room next door with his new bride, Sibyl. Actually, the former spouses Elyot and Amanda are the first to make this realization, and their unexpected reunion is one of the most beautifully crafted love duets in modern drama. At first they're just surprised and a little bothered to see other again, then they warm toward one another, and then they make the startling discovery that they're still in love with each other and damn the torpedoes.
Off they run to Paris — without bothering to tell their new spouses of their departure — and we're left to discover whether a love that went bad once is bound to do so again. Meanwhile, Victor and Sibyl discover they've been abandoned, and head for Paris themselves to confront the fugitive lovers.
But if the plot of the play is lovers in flight, its real subject is something else: Why the people we adore most are the ones who have the most power — and inclination — to hurt us, enrage us and drive us to the loony bin. With remarkable deftness, Coward shows us how Elyot and Amanda's love talk turns repeatedly into the language of attack and counterattack, how even their agreement to stop all conflict when a certain phrase is said can't succeed against the call of entrenched bloody-mindedness.
If Private Lives has any depth at all — and it's so wonderfully written, it almost doesn't need any — it's all in this theme, presented early in the first act and carried through to the end. My own experience suggests that constant readiness for a dustup is present only in certain personalities and more or less (fortunately) absent in the rest of us. But Coward wants us to believe that love and meanness nourish each other, and he makes his point so brightly that we'd rather agree than sail against the wind. We may not be Elyot and Amanda, but for a couple of hours, it's fun to think that we are.
And it's fun to watch the four fine actors working in the Stageworks ensemble. Buzzeo is excellent as the sarcastic but sentimental Elyot, the sort of man who can't help but be honest with himself and others, who has to verbalize his feelings no matter how dangerous or untimely, and who can be a real pest when he's not in the mood for world peace. Buzzeo has to make certain suave confessions sound credible, and he manages them all with real panache and not a hint of irony. For example:
"My heart broke on that damned trip around the world. I saw such beautiful things, darling. Moonlight shining on old temples, strange barbaric dances in jungle villages, scarlet flamingoes flying over deep, deep blue water. Breathlessly lovely and completely unexciting because you weren't there to see them with me." This may look good on the page, but spoken on stage it can come across as corny and artificial. It never does with Buzzeo, who inhabits the role of Elyot as if it were second nature to him. The other top actor is Mamatas, whose Amanda is precisely detailed and stunningly iridescent. Unfortunately for the production, Mamatas is visibly too old to share the stage with Buzzeo, Eaker and Chaplin — which is no criticism of her talent, just of her appropriateness. But even with this disparity, Mamatas' Amanda is prismatic, supremely confident, effortlessly surprising. As Sibyl, Barbara Eaker is a conventional woman distressed to find herself married to a decidedly unconventional man. As Victor, John Chaplin is brawny, sober, and just bellicose enough to punch Elyot out under these circumstances. As the French maid Louise, Megan James isn't very successful; instead of letting the comedy find itself, she insists on getting laughs and therefore gets few.
Anna Brennen's direction is generally tiptop. Particularly pleasing is her choice of the lovely song "Someday I'll Find You" as Elyot and Amanda's theme — in his text Coward doesn't specify what tune it is that brings them together. Finally, Amy Cianci's costumes, from Elyot's suit to Amanda's pajamas, are on the money.
"Let's be superficial," says Elyot to Amanda, "and pity the poor philosophers." It's not clear that Coward was ever capable of being more than superficial, but in a play like Private Lives — as in Hay Fever and Blithe Spirit — he made the surface of things so bright and enchanting, one can only relish each passing view. If you've seen Private Lives before, you'll want to take this opportunity to reacquaint yourself with it. And if you've never seen a Coward comedy, well, the Stageworks version is a sturdy introduction to one of the most talented wits who ever graced the theater with his work.
This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2008.