There's always this to be said for the plays conceived and directed by Anne Bogart during her 10 consecutive years of displaying them at Actors Theater of Louisville: they grab your attention and hold on for dear life. For her latest foray into Coward territory -- a follow-up to her acclaimed ATL production of Private Lives a few years back -- she has fashioned an Americanized version of Hay Fever, Coward's 1925 comedy set in an English country house inhabited by a madly witty and self-absorbed family of thoughtless theatrical/artistic types whose "get the-guests" antics are second nature to them. Transferring the play to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where such rich and famous types have congregated for years, Bogart makes the house a gleaming glass and steel palace (in Neil Patel's eye-popping modernistic set) where electronic gadgets constantly go awry, the roof leaks during rainstorms, and swarms of caretakers are kept busy using squeegees on all that glass while others monotonously plod through yard work.
The concept would work fine if some of the jarring British references (place names and expressions) were Americanized, too, but I suppose Bogart probably was prohibited by the Coward Estate from tampering with the text. So we have the odd experience of hearing that Cookham, the place in England where Coward set his play, is in Bucks County. Exchanges about British newspapers and British theatres, as opposed to those in this country, are decidedly disorienting. And it's hardly common to hear an American say someone is "perfectly beastly," "perfectly ripping," or "potty." G
rousing aside, Bogart's mainly SITI Company cast -- led by the incomparable Ellen Lauren as Judith Bliss, the randy aging actress who presides over her histrionic household with a somewhat inattentive flair, is, as usual, spectacular. Coward's fast-paced dialogue comes through razor-sharp as the Bliss family -- novelist husband David (Daniel T. Parker), daughter Sorel (Susan Hightower), and artist son Simon (Barney O Hanlon) -- trade quips and barbs with each other and the guests that, unknown to each other, they've invited for the weekend with thoughts of romantic dalliance: a diplomat (Stephen Webber), an amateur boxer (Jeffrey Frace), a woman that Judith says "goes about using sex as a sort of shrimping net" (Kelly Maurer), and a young woman come to see Judith's husband (John Jubett). The sortings and unsortings progress as the players assemble for drinks and dancing and parade about in James Schuette s dazzling costumes. They also flirt outrageously and get roped into one of the maddening word games proposed by the Blisses.
Don't expect any of Coward's gorgeous songs to be heard in Bogart's setting. What you get is Aretha Franklin's "This Song's For You," hilariously lip-synched by Lauren and Webber as they toy with each other. Lauren s physical dexterity in her comings and goings is a wonder. So is the gyrating of O'Hanlon in his skimpy bathing costume.
This play moves! Yet it seems to me that with Bogart's terrific cast, Coward plain and straight (no pun intended) would work just as well and perhaps provide even more satisfaction.
