Hay Fever (review)

Fueled by the electronic rhythms of contemporary dance music (techno or trance, if you will) and set in an architectural space inspired by the clean, geometric lines of Mies van der Rohe, Anne Bogart's production of Noel Coward's 1924 comedy Hay Fever meshes flapper-era eccentricity with the campy gloss of late-sixties high modernism—Coward filtered through Joe Orton and reimagined for the twenty-first century. At its center was an exuberant performance by Ellen Lauren, Associate Artistic Director and founding member of the Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI). Lauren, who plays Coward's theatrical matriarch Judith Bliss, was a walking Hirschfeld cartoon in rubber galoshes, garden hat, and a blowsy Yves Saint Laurent number. Her presence grounded Bogart's hilarious yet uneven production with style, physical precision, and ferocious comic timing.

Hay Fever is not an intricately plotted comedy, yet Bogart and the SITI Company actors hurled themselves into Coward's absurd situations and rapid-fire dialogue with great intensity. The action revolves around the Bliss family—novelist David, retired stage actress Judith, and their talented, precocious offspring Simon and Sorel. Bored and desperate for action—all four are stagnating at their summer estate in the English countryside (Bogart set her production in Bucks County, Pennsylvania)—each has invited, unbeknownst to the others, a "special" visitor for the weekend. Amid couplings and uncouplings, revelations, renunciations and reappraisals, the Bliss family estate is transformed into a "featherbed of false emotions," where artifice and melodrama trump the banalities of everyday living and each guest falls victim to the Bliss's biting, highly theatricalized manipulations. Such lunacy was best embodied in the closing moments of the second act as Judith and her children launch into an impromptu performance of the former actress' most popular stage vehicle, Love's Whirlwind. This sequence was a comic tour-de-force, with Lauren reaching the dizzying physicality of a contemporary Lucille Ball; her Judith Bliss was so enraptured by her own performance that all who surrounded her were lost amid the complex layers of fictional deceit. Grossly underappreciated, Lauren is simply one of America's great stage actors. Other SITI Company performers, however, were just as memorable.

Discovered dancing alone upon the stage as audience members searched for their seats, Barney O'Hanlon's Simon Bliss provided the requisite queer energy necessary to invoke the ghost of Coward, continually throwing off balance the dramatic action's mock-heteronormativity with his playful, polymorphous sexuality. O'Hanlon's impish performance was bold and risky (in the third act he appeared in nothing more than a Speedo), and he quickly established a loose, lascivious mood that governed the entire evening. His steamy, open-mouthed kiss with Lauren in the final moments of the play, however, was more disturbing than provocative. Stephen Webber was a master of dry understatement and he moved with the silky, pampered assurance that befits Sorel's visiting diplomatist, Richard Greatham. Webber's second act encounter with Lauren was a hilarious, slow burn dance of naïveté, and Lauren captured her unwitting prey with a full-on seductive vamp to Aretha Franklin's "This Song's For You." It was a wonderful, over-the-top sequence and Webber and Lauren pursued every moment with full abandon. Together, these SITI Company veterans provided Louisville audiences with a master class in contemporary acting style. Just as fun was Kelly Maurer's trashy turn as Coward's Myra Arundal, a Hamptons-bred, neo-feminist in black Manolo Blahniks.

Perhaps the most audience-friendly component of the show was the landscapers, window washers and exterminators—played by ATL acting interns—who worked throughout the production sardonically pointing up class divisions and the leisure-addled nature of Coward's central characters. It was a distancing effect that felt arbitrary at times but also provided multiple layers of comic action. Throughout the first act, for example, the irritating squeak of a squeegee removing water from the...