Like-minded lovers burn brightly in APT’s ‘Private Lives’
Special to the Journal Sentinel
Spring Green — Is it true that opposites attract?
You’d never know it from watching the two newlywed couples honeymooning in adjoining suites at the start of Noël Coward’s “Private Lives,” which opened Aug. 8 on American Players Theatre’s outdoor stage, under James Bohnen’s insightful direction.
On one half of Andrew Boyce’s symmetrical set — in which every sculpted bush and stick of furniture appearing on one side is identically mirrored on the other — an impulsive Amanda (Deborah Staples) begins her second marriage with the stolid Victor (John Taylor Phillips).
Next door, a flamboyant Elyot (Jim DeVita) begins his second marriage with the conformist Sibyl (Kelsey Brennan).
There’s showy embraces aplenty on both sides of the stage, but there’s none of what Amanda refers to as the “cosmic thingummys” which, she tells us, must “fuse at the same moment” for sparks to fly.
The cosmic fireworks here are all between Amanda and Elyot — once tempestuously
married and still passionately in love, five years after they divorced.
One bottomless kiss between them has more electricity than the combined wattage of all their spousal smooching, which is why they soon ditch their new mates and make a mad dash for Paris.
What ensues there plays like a madcap version of “Much Ado About Nothing” — in which Staples and DeVita starred together as Beatrice and Benedick, in a 1999 APT production that Bohnen directed.
As with Shakespeare’s famous pair of quarreling lovers, Amanda and Elyot are a lot alike — something Bohnen drives home through numerous moments in which Staples and DeVita move and gesture in synchronized tandem.
Even gender-driven distinctions between them begin to implode.
In everything from the way they stand and sit to how they dance and smoke, Staples and DeVita defy engendered expectations underscoring sexual difference.
Instead they’re bent on entangling themselves — sinuously and sensually — into one androgynous whole.
When poets speak of all-consuming love, this is the sort of transcendent coupling they have in mind.
But such a conflagration inevitably scorches those living within the flames.
Once in Paris, Amanda and Elyot fight like crazies, slinging barbs and bodies in an uproarious but also frighteningly unhinged free-for-all (excellent fight direction by Matt Hawkins).
Alike they may be. But they still always fall apart.
For all the laughs delivered by this “Private Lives” — and this production is funny from start to finish — Staples and DeVita never entirely lose sight of just how isolated and alone Amanda and Elyot are, particularly as nobody else understands them the way they understand each other.
True to Alejo Vietti’s fabulous costuming — underscoring how risqué this pair can be, in relation to their more conventionally dressed spouses — Amanda and Elyot are too smart and honest to make peace for long with what Elyot refers to as “futile moralists who try to make life unbearable,” through lies that deny both vitality and mortality.
Hence they inevitably and continually turn back to each other for refuge — even though Staples and DeVita play out the string with an almost forlorn desperation, suggesting that this Amanda and Elyot know quite well that every reunion will result in recrimination.
But even if they’re condemned to repetition, what’s the alternative?
In a production that’s attuned to Coward’s recurring references to aging, decay and death, Staples and DeVita call to mind Beckett’s famous tramps in “Waiting for Godot”: They hope for something better even though they know in their bones it will never come.
Like those tramps, at least they occasionally have each other as they count down the dwindling hours, in a world where they’re both acutely aware that nothing this good lasts forever.
Including this production: See it, while you can.