The Ex Factor
Divorced and remarried husbands and wives return volleys of comic repartee in Private Lives at Ithaca’s Kitchen Theatre
By James MacKillop G
etting audiences to pay attention to the act when most of them have come to party. That was the daunting task
facing director Margarett Perry in getting Noel Coward’s 80-year-old high comedy, Private Lives, on the boards in the Kitchen Theatre Company’s gleaming new space at 417 W. State St. in Ithaca. Local merchants pitched in every night of the first week for casks of free-flowing wine and bountiful trays of munchies. Steady, even cascading, laughter commands attention, of course, but so does finding surprising new angles in a beloved treasure. Much like what has hap- pened to the theater company itself.
The old Kitchen, located in the colonnaded,
antebellum Cayuga Hotel, was famously cramped. Many audiences thought this was an asset; with only 73 seats, every one is certain to be good. Actors felt differently. Running quickly offstage could bring your nose smack into a wall. And making an entrance from stage left could mean going outdoors, even into the rain or snow, before starting with your lines. The new place is still “bold and intimate”
(part of the company’s slogan), with a grand total of 99 seats. But now it’s possible to walk perhaps 20 feet up and down the stage, not just laterally. Assuredly, jokes can get more laughs with distance. The new stage is also open on three sides.
As you look at the costumed players before you (thanks to Lisa Boquist for the sexy period duds), you can look beyond them to see audi- ence members, often guffawing, in Ithaca street wear. With the Kitchen’s more usual fare, contemporary and edgy, we’re prepared for the implicit postmodernist effect. Noel Coward, however, wrote for a proscenium arch, where the audience is supposed to suspend disbelief, even when Coward played Elyot, reading his own lines. What Perry’s Private Lives shows us, then, is that Coward’s personal and verbal frisson thrives in contemporary staging. All
those lines we know (She: “How was China?” He: “Very big.” She: “How was Japan?” He: “Very small.”) are still gleaming gold when we’ve thrown disbelief aside. A much greater surprise for Kitchen regulars is
to see Brian Dykstra, Perry’s usual leading man, as Elyot. Although he is a resident elsewhere, Dykstra has been a familiar presence around the company for four years, often in works of his own composition, like last Christmas’ one-man rant,Ho!, or his verbal beating of George Carlin at his own game, A Play on Words (February 2009). When composing his own persona, Dyk- stra comes off as bearish, irascible and nearing the working classes. His costume often includes a loud sport shirt with the tail hanging out. In building a new Elyot, banishing Cow-
ard’s savoir-faire, Dykstra begins with a flaw- less Oxbridge accent. “Girls” is pronounced “guhls.” The glint in this Elyot’s eyes implies a barely suppressed madness, affronted by the absurdity of finding his ex-wife Amanda (Carol Halstead) on the very next terrace of their posh Riviera hotel, along with her new boy-toy husband Victor (Tobias Burns). When he gets to such lines as, “Some women must be struck regularly, like gongs,” we think he means it. Dykstra’s tone frequently pays off in lines that look like nothing on the page, like complaining about a band’s limited repertory when it has played the same song over and over. Dykstra’s presence as Elyot does not mean
that this season-opening Private Lives is some kind of old-home week, or that every character has been stretched into new corners. In casting the other three leads Perry and the Kitchen have searched the world. As Amanda, Carol Halstead brings extensive New York City and national credits, with everything from Shakespeare to Feydeau. Facing Dys- ktra’s Elyot, Halstead’s Amanda bursts with bluster and bravado. Their physical Punch- and-Judy routine in the second act is funnier because we can see that she could wallop
Cowardly lines: Brian Dykstra and Carol Halstead in Kitchen Theatre’s Private Lives. Elsewhere, although the text hardly needs
him. As for how an older woman could hold the passionate affections of a younger man, we can tell that Halstead’s Amanda comes with healthy appetites for more exciting fare than cucumber sandwiches. Yes, she’s a cou- gar before the term was invented. Demands were equally high for the less-
rewarding roles of Sybil (Emily Renee Bennett) and Victor, the younger second spouses of Elyot and Amanda, soon to be discarded. Bennett has been working steadily internationally since she graduated from London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 2008, and Tobias Burns (Victor) went to Harvard and danced with Alvin Ailey. Significant in their casting, apart from their talents, both Bennett and Burns are noticeably younger and smaller than Elyot and Amanda. And they are both outstandingly physically attractive. That’s what second spouses, trophy wives and husbands, are supposed to look like. In Perry’s handing, both echo their elder
spouses in certain ways. Sybil’s incessant rattling suggests a nutsiness that would have been magnetized by Elyot’s wilder streak. And Victor’s forthright stridency should not only be attractive to Amanda but implies a man ready to take on an independent woman who still craves intimacy. Perry’s energy and spritz in staging Private
Lives implies the project has been on her mind a long while. Rather than knock off gig- gles with every little bauble, she builds a kind of comic surplus for bigger payoffs, as with Sybil’s hilarious complaint in the second act.
embellishment, there are two innovations not seen in the previous five productions of Private Lives. One is the greater prominence given music, some of it of Coward’s own composition, like “Moonlight Becomes You.” Here a piano is brought on stage, with the keyboard away from our prying eyes. The second is the amount of time given to
the wordless peregrinations of the hag-like French maid Louise (Camilla Schade), when the reunited Elyot and Amanda have returned to Paris in the last scene. Oh, those drooping stockings cannot be found in stores these days. Schade is a Kitchen regular, having appeared in Harold Pinter’s Old Times (2008). Perry or someone knew she was a gifted mime who could turn the mere snooping around the apart- ment into a scene-stealing laugh riot. The bigger stage means more work
for Kent Goetz’s period set design, E.D. Intemann’s scene-enhancing lighting, and Lesley Greene’s sound design, with aural jokes from the Coward repertory. And in a last directorial wink, Perry tells us she is a direc- tor of today. In the final scene the rejected spouses, Sybil and Victor, are thrown together in battle royal, going for each other’s jugular. Blackout. Lights on. And they’re smooching. It’s all an act, my friend.
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This production runs through Sunday, Sept. 19. See Times Table for information.
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