Noël Coward: Hay Fever (live production, Coronado Playhouse, June 3, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I’ve been interested in seeing Noël Coward’s 1924 play Hay Fever since I first read about it in Arlene Croce’s The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book. The reason it’s mentioned there is that Coward based the play’s central characters, the Blisses – novelist David (David Dartt), semi-retired actress Judith (Bobbi Randall), and their children Simon (Benjamin Monts) and Sorel (Phoebe Appel) – on a real-life theatrical family he knew. “Judith Bliss”’s real-life prototype was legendary actress Laurette Taylor (a huge star at the turn of the last century who lasted long enough to play Amanda Wingfield in the world-premiere production of Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie in 1946, though she died just after that) and “David”’s was her second husband, Peg O’My Heart author J. Hartley Manners. “Simon Bliss” was Dwight Taylor, whom Croce was writing about because he wrote either the original stories or the scripts for three of the Astaire-Rogers films: The Gay Divorcée, Top Hat and Follow the Fleet. (The Gay Divorcée was based on a stage musical called Gay Divorce which Taylor had adapted from an unproduced play by J. Hartley Manners called An Adorable Adventure.) While I’m not sure why Coward eliminated the step-parent angle and made Simon and Sorel the biological children of both older Blisses – he might have had a dramatically stronger play if he’d kept David just a stepfather instead of a father – overall Hay Fever is a quite entertaining confection.

There’s not much of a plot – each of the four Blisses has invited a house guest over for the weekend at their country estate in Cookham, unbeknownst to the others, and the play is about how the Blisses drive their would-be guests crazy over the weekend until all four guests get sick of the Blisses and sneak out in the morning. The house guests are boxer Sandy Tyrrell (Isaí Luna), whom Judith has invited as a boy-toy for extra-relational activity (we assume either her husband is so wrapped up in his work he won’t notice his wife getting her ashes hauled by another guy or they have an “understanding”); “diplomatist” Richard Greatham (Pete Zanko, a co-worker of my husband Charles’s at the Mission Hills Vons), whom Sorel has invited in hopes of sparking an ongoing relationship; “party girl” Myra Arundel (Kathryn Schellinger), whom Simon has brought down for a weekend of fun and games; and Jackie Coryton (Violeta Ruiz-Lopez), whom father David has asked down for reasons only Noël Coward could have explained. Before they get to the Blisses, Richard and Jackie meet at the train station and seem to hit it off, though at the end Jackie pairs with Sandy and Richard with Myra. Also in the mix is the Blisses’ housemaid Clara (Jacqueline Waterworth), who seems to be an island of sanity in the midst of the Blisses’ madness until the very end, when she’s obviously trying to put the make on one of the male house guests as they’re just trying to get out of there as unobtrusively as possible.

Director Hannah Meade decided to move the time of the play from 1923 to 2023, though she did this subtly; the only connection with now is the bad rap songs used to introduce each act, and I suspect her motive in changing the time was to spare herself and her cast the trouble and expense of having to find period costumes. During the weekend from hell the Blisses and their house guests pair off in various combinations that make Noël Coward a precursor of Woody Allen; I remember when I first saw Allen’s film Hannah and Her Sisters I said you could easily imagine watching the movie again with the characters pairing together differently from the way they did, and it’s the same with Hay Fever and some of Coward’s other plays. The big joke in Coward is that he was a Gay man who wrote plays ostensibly about straight people but made them all behave like Gay men. The production was mostly sheer joy; the acting was generally finely honed (though I was disappointed a bit in Benjamin Monts’ casting as Simon; I was expecting Cary Grant and I got John Belushi, and Isaí Luna was a bit too stocky to be credible as a boxer but he was still sexy as all hell), Meade’s direction up to the challenges of the material and a splendid time was had by all – including the audience, despite the challenge of seeing everything and everybody because the Coronado Playhouse doesn’t have a raked floor (it’s a multi-purpose venue and its main other purpose is as a dance hall, for which a raked floor would be impossible) and therefore I had to make out the action as best I could through the gaps left by audience members in front of us.