'LONG ISLAND SOUND' SPLASHES WITH BITING COWARD WIT
Long Island Sound
American Reporter
Lucy Komisar
September 8, 2002
You can be rich and dumb at the same time.
NEW YORK -- Noel Coward's recently-discovered comic play is a romp laced with great bons mots (if that is not redundant) and his signature biting repartee.
A character declares, "All this and Evan, too." Another ripostes, "That was originally said by Dorothy Parker." And return of serve: "Everything was originally said by Dorothy Parker."
How could you not love show like this? And The Acting Company, in a premier staging headed by the cool, contained and extremely correct Simon Jones as Evan Lorrimer, the visiting English novelist on a U.S. lecture tour, gives you every reason to rejoice in this first production.
Coward's point is that rich people are fools who like to surround themselves with impecunious intellectuals who, if they succumb, are also fools. The play is based on a memorably unpleasant 1937 weekend Coward had in the Hamptons.
Cynthia Harris is perfectly effusive and slightly ditsy as Louise, the self-dramatizing rich lady presiding over a gaggle of guests at her luxury country house. Her friends amuse themselves by dishing the dirt or having affairs. As Louise exclaims, "You're only middle-aged once!"
This upscale habitat is peopled by every type Coward met on his own forays into the social jungle - the crass, the seductive, the self-absorbed. Director Scott Alan Evans mixes the word play and slapstick in expert measure.
The dialogue is fast-moving and fatal. When a couple is introduced as the Don Lucases, Evan inquires, "Are there many?" You know Coward had met many who resembled the upper-class dowager (Patricia O'Connell) who hates FDR. She is crazy about all writers. "That rather vitiates the complement," remarks Evan, who has a brilliant talent for being polite and honest at the same time.
For Coward, it must have been a delicious attempted revenge. Alas, written in 1947, the play didn't get a stage production because American producers, exhibiting the cultural obtuseness that proved Coward's point, thought it too anti-American. Here he was, attacking the prospective audience! The Brits, cleaning up after the American-won war, weren't interested either. The play was undiscovered for 53 years till a researcher found it in Coward's papers in Montreux, Switzerland.
The Actors Company, made up of seasoned performers, includes Scott Schafer, who is over-the-top comic as Lester, the giggly screaming-gay actor, Delphi Harrington, who brings a underlying pathos to the assertive Irene Marlow, and Brent Harris, who creates a fine caricature as Hughes Hitchcock, the Texan. Julie Halston is perfectly cast as Carola, the Hollywood prima donna who skillfully conjures up a 1930's Carole Lombard. The play's cast of nineteen is, alas, too large to single out every one of the excellent players.