“Private Lives”

Posted by Gail M. Burns - August 2010

“Why am I always expected to wear a dressing-gown, smoke cigarettes in a long holder and say ‘Darling, how wonderful’?”

- Noël Coward

When I heard that Carl Ritchie was directing and starring in Noël Coward’s Private Lives for his second Taconic Stage dinner theatre offering of 2010, I was slightly puzzled. While Coward is hardly heavy psychological drama like O’Neill or Strindberg, he is also a little more literate that your average dinner theatre fare. Also, my memory was that “Private Lives” ran about two hours and a quarter (including an intermission) which is a little long for the genre as well. And I knew how big, er, small the performance space was at the Light House Restaurant. Were Elliot and Amanda’s inter-marital brawls going to break all the restaurant’s crockery as well as their own??

I should have known that Ritchie was savvy enough and understood his audience well enough to present Private Lives Lite. This version runs just 90 minutes, including the intermission during which you are served dessert (coffee and cookies) and nary an ashtray is smashed in the considerably shortened second act.

The plot remains the same. Elliot* Chase (Ritchie) and his new wife Sibyl (Leda Hodgson) finds that their honeymoon suite on the French Riviera is adjacent to the one occupied by his first wife Amanda (Susan Fullerton) and her new husband, Victor Prynne (Jeffrey Judd). Realizing that they are still in love, Amanda and Elliot abandon their new spouses and run off together to her “flat” in Paris, where the manage to spend a few days alone together before Victor and Sibyl track them down.

He also uses that miniscule playing area brilliantly well with the sets he has designed, which are painted that a lovely Pepto-Bismol pink. The first act, where Amanda and Elliot meet on the adjoining terraces of their adjacent honeymoon suites, uses the front of the stage only. Then, while Louise Pillai, as Amanda’s totally demented housemaid, warbles La Vie en Rose better than Edith Piaf ever did, the stage crew (Sam Spragis and George Gherardi) swing the terrace doors back to reveal the equally pink sitting room of Amanda’s flat.

Coward wrote Private Lives in just four days from an outline he had written while convalescing from the flu in Shanghai. He immediately cabled Gertrude Lawrence and told her to keep autumn 1930 free to star with him in it. She played Amanda to his Elyot (I have no idea why Ritchie is spelling it Elliot in this production, but he is), Adrianne Allen played Sibyl, and a young nobody named Laurence Olivier played Victor. That’s the kind of life Noël Coward (1899-1973) lived then. He had been an international star for most of the Roaring ‘20’s and was at the height of his popularity and creative powers in 1930.

Coward was a gay man, but of course that was never mentioned publicly in those days. And Coward felt that is private life was just that, private, refusing to acknowledge his sexual preference even in the swinging ‘60’s, claiming that “There are still a few old ladies in Worthing who don’t know” and that he didn’t want to shock them. But the people who went to see him in his plays – and he starred in many of them – knew that he was gay, and that was part of the joke. Coward very carefully crafted his persona and his fastidiously fashionable image, which included those dressing gowns his characters, including Elliot, often sport.

Ritchie has a home in Columbia County and lives as an openly gay man, so the audiences in Copake are in on same joke watching him play a much-married straight man as earlier audiences would have watching Coward. I have reviewed two previous productions of this play (2004 at the Ghent Playhouse and 2008 at Barrington Stage) where I didn’t know the sexual orientation of the actors playing Elliot because in general I, like the U.S. Armed Forces, don’t ask and don’t tell. And it hardly ever matters – gay people play straight ones and vice versa all the time. But it matters here because this is a Noël Coward role in a Noël Coward and the whole point was that the audience knew then, as they do here, that he was gay. And Ritchie plays the role as I imagine Coward would have, as if the audience is in on the joke. I got a kick out of it, and the experience has given me a whole new perspective on Coward’s work.

Fullerton is a fairly good match for Ritchie, although I found that it bothered me that she was blonde. It doesn’t say anywhere in Coward’s script that Amanda must be a brunette, but obviously I still buy into the stereotype that blondes are “fluffier” and less assertive than darker haired gals.

I was most interested in Hodgson’s casting as Sibyl. Coward DOES say that Sibyl is blonde, and I have always seen her played as younger than both Elliot and Amanda. And certainly “fluffier,” too. I had seen Hodgson play Irene Ruddock in A Lady of Letters earlier that same day and was eager to see her play a young, silly thing after her hard, angular portrayal of a lonely spinster. Hodgson is a very attractive woman, and I expected to see her beauty played up here as it had been played down earlier.

But she and Ritchie invented a Sibyl who was not young or blonde or “fluffy” in the slightest bit. She was, in fact, a married version of Irene, a maiden lady who had found love later in life. This Sibyl might not have the sexual experience of Amanda, but she knew exactly who she was and what she wanted out of life, marriage, and Elliot.

Judd seemed a little young and handsome to play Victor, who shouldn’t look as if he can beat Elliot at a fight. But Ritchie never let the gentlemen comes to blows anymore than he let Elliot strike Amanda “regularly, like a gong.” I have seen very violent stagings of this play, and have written warnings about not taking young people and how times, and laws, have changed when it comes to spousal abuse, for there is no doubt that Amanda hits Elliot, too. We have all known couples for whom a certain amount of real or threatened violence seems to drive their relationship, and that is exactly the sort of folks Coward wrote about in this play, but Ritchie has extracted all of that nastiness, which, as I said at the start, wouldn’t have been possible to stage safely in such a small space anyway.

I mentioned Pillai’s singing scene change between Acts I and II, which really is the highlight of her time on stage. I have no idea who first played this funny little role, but it is always a show stopper as each director and actress find ways to make it hilarious and quirky. All of Pillai’s lines, sung and spoken, are in French, and she sounds very authentic.

Sandra Cuoco has designed some lovely costumes, including a very spiffy dressing gown for Ritchie in Act II, natch. Joseph Seldz has designed the effective lighting, which include a row of genuine footlights with art deco reflectors around the back of them (the side facing the audience).

I was only sad that there was no music – live or recorded. Coward was also a song writer and Private Lives contains one of his most popular numbers Someday I’ll Find You. It actually plays an important role in Act I, something I wasn’t aware of until I missed it here:

“I’ll leave you never,
Love you for ever,
All our past sorrow redeeming:
Try to make it true,
Say you love me too,
Someday I’ll find you again.”

I really got a kick out of Private Lives Lite, although I am sure Coward purists will be appalled. As usual, the dinner part of the dinner theatre experience was enjoyable too. The night I was there the menu consisted of salmon, beef medallions, broccoli, mashed potatoes, salad, and the aforementioned dessert. I don’t know if a vegetarian entrée option is available. Alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks are available at the bar and are NOT included in the ticket price.

The Taconic Stage Company production of Private Lives runs Fridays and Saturdays, August 20 through Septeptember 4 at the Light House Restaurant and Marina on Copake Lake, 351 Lakeview, Craryville, NY 12521. The show runs 90 minutes with one intermission and is suitable for ages 10 and up. Dinner at 7 p.m. and show at 8 p.m. Tickets for dinner and show are $40. For reservations call (518) 325-1234. For more information: www.TaconicStage.com.

* Coward spelled it Elyot and I have no idea why it is not spelled that way in this production.

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