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As it turns out, “Private Lives” hasn’t aged well. But it’s not playwright Noël Coward’s fault. The whole idea of the play was to take the things people said in private and put them on the stage. Its 1930 premiere was so good at this that it almost got closed down by a British censor. Fortunately, that same notoriety guaranteed sold-out shows for a long time, and made it one of the great plays of the 20th century.
We of the Internet age are drowned in scandal on an hourly basis, and might respond to the play’s action with, “Okay. What else you got?”
The Pear Theatre and its director, Dennis M. Lickteig, added a gender switch to one of the four principals, so that one of the play’s two central couples is same-sex, but the change is not all that provocative.
I will quickly add that none of this is the fault of The Pear, either. As usual, they’ve got some fine actors in this production. And although the play isn’t as fiery as one might wish, it does provide that intriguing effect of planting ideas in the brain that sprout for the rest of the weekend. Most of these have to do with the complicated ways of human sexuality and courtship.
The architecture of Coward’s plot is a pleasure to follow and analyze. Plentiful foreshadowing leaves a nice trail of clues. The initial hint is purely physical. We’ve got two balconies, strewn with bougainvillea (just guessing), apparently located in some vacation paradise, and divided by a modest railing.
A honeymoon couple, Sibyl and Elyot, make their appearance at audience left to canoodle and bicker. Sibyl seems a little overcurious about Elyot’s ex-husband, Andrew, which leads to an excellent argument about petty jealousies and commitment. When they slam their way back to their hotel room, you can almost count “one, two” before the right-hand door opens and out comes another honeymooning couple, Victor and (you saw this coming) Andrew. These two proceed to almost an identical bout of canoodling and bickering, down to the repetition of certain key phrases, almost like repeated motifs in a symphony. (In a sense, there’s a beautiful classical symmetry to all of this.)
Much of this action goes directly to the “gun on the mantel” principle. If a writer places a gun on the mantel, sometime before the end of the story, that gun needs to be used.
The Pear cast does a splendid job with a veddy British, high-vocabulary script (my companion, Queen Greta, kept repeating the actor’s warmup, “red leather, yellow leather”). They also did well with the accents, which are nicely understated. Playing the (eventual) central couple, Lysander Abadia (Andrew) and Paul Araquistain (Elyot) exhibited a great feel for rhythm and phrasing. In the second act, as they waited for their new spouses to rain hell down on their heads, they demonstrated the unfortunate dance that doomed their marriage: five minutes of kissing and pillow talk, ending with a misstatement that launches three minutes of intense bickering, followed by a safe word and two minutes of silence.
The silences, in fact, are some of the most striking passages in the play. The meat, however, is in the bickering, like a prototype for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” And yes, even in the actual fighting, which gets a little physical. When Andrew and Elyot are eventually visited by the Walking Scorned (Victor and Sibyl), the comeuppance is rich.
Perhaps the funniest moments come when the victimized pair begins warring among themselves. Amanda Korkunis (Sibyl) has a particular panache for tossing little Molotov cocktails of insult. As Victor, Charles Anthony is a little stiff at times, but then so is his character, so all’s well that ends well. The maid Louise (Helen Kim) gets the best job of all, speaking only French and rolling her eyes at these weird Brits who have invaded her chambers.
Greet Jaspeart’s period costume designs are grand, notably Elyot’s gold dressing gown and Andrew’s grey suit with sky-blue ascot. As a fan of jazz standards, I appreciated the bits of music that ended the scenes, including the great argument song “Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off,” and, directly before the exes head to Paris, the first line of “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” “There may be trouble ahead…” Oh, you betcha.
Kudos to intimacy and fight coordinator Bessie Zolno and dialect coach Brennah Kemmerly, both of whom had a tremendous amount of work on their hands.
‘Private Lives’ runs through Oct. 11 at The Pear Theatre, 1110 La Avenida Street, Suite A, Mountain View. Tickets are $48. thepear.org or 650-254-1148. $48.
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