Word: cowards
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...Coward's Lives is organized in an unusual and precarious manner for a situation comedy: a threadbare plot is sprinkled with "life-lines" (guffaw-inducing one-liners) for the major characters, Elyot Chase and Amanda Prynne, and occassional emergency appearances of the play's idiotic and insufferable secondary characters (Victor Prynne, Sybil Chase, and Louise). The first act introduces the entire plot: Amanda and Elyot, once married and later divorced, fall in love again while honeymooning with their newly found spouses, Victor and Sybil--two cretin-like characters representing the very best in English shallowness. There is no further development...
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...
Private Lives, a Noel Coward period piece about love and marriage, is being revived at the Tufts Arena Theater in Medford. The press release says that the show is "perfect summer entertainment," but so is rolling in the grass and what else is new? The play is set in the 1930s and presumably it's being milked for all the nostalgia it's worth. Any play that has a maid in it named Louise can't be all bad. Tuesday through Thursday at 8:15. General admission is $3.50, student tickets...
...kicker of anecdotes was the despair of his sources. During the World War II point system of rationing managed by the Office of Price Administration, George S. Kaufman said that Lyons "missed so many points that he was under investigation by the OPA." One botched Lyons story: after Noel Coward had made some disparaging remarks about Brooklyn and earned the borough's vocal displeasure, he began his visits to U.S. military hospitals with the question: "Anybody here from Brooklyn?" If any of the patients assented, Coward replied: "I'm Noel Coward. Go ahead." When Lyons reported this byplay...