Word: arnott
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Private Lives has an exotic origin, an erotic icing, and a moronic plot which forces director Peter D. Arnott and his chief actors, William Franklin Hutson and Jan Lewis, to scramble desperately to salvage a basically nebbish play. Noel Coward, the first English playwright to introduce Henry Ford's assembly line production techniques to theater, wrote the comedy in 1930 while in Shanghai seemingly to pose a challenge: Who could take his featherweight literary sedative about marriage and sex in English high society and transform it into an exciting and riotous evening's entertainment? The Tufts Summer Theater company...
...Arnott, in order to squeeze the maximum wit out of Coward's insipid manuscript, has worked out what appears to be a second-by-second computer program for verbal inflections, facial contortions, physical maneuvers, and furniture kicking. During the extensive arguments and love bouts of Elyot and Amanda, the play's spirited and engaging cynics, the precise sense of timing turns insults, cigarette lighting, and record smashing into high comic art. At times, Arnott's exhaustive direction and his actors' slavish execution reaches self-parody: it is worthwhile, during the course of the play, to study carefully the director...