Leo (to Gilda): The actual facts are so simple. I love you. You love me. You love Otto. I love Otto. Otto loves you. Otto loves me. There now! Start to unravel from there. � From Design for Living, by No�l Coward
LET'S not talk about sex or m�nages � trois � not yet, anyway. Let's talk about something far more interesting (and harder to find). Let's talk about genius.
When No�l Coward's Design for Living opened on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore in January 1933, Coward was 33 and had been a one-man pyromaniacal display since writing The Vortex in 1923 and starring in it in 1924. In between had come Hay Fever, Private Lives and Cavalcade, not to mention all the other shows he wrote, directed, starred in or composed songs for. For all we know, he was also writing under the name Cole Porter as a Swiss tax dodge. Cole, No�l? Dead giveaways.
In Design for Living � which is being revived by the Roundabout Theater Company at the American Airlines Theater, where it opens on Thursday � Coward portrayed Leo, a playwright whose work is described as polished, provocative, witty and brilliant. Modesty precluded any more adjectives, though Leo does bristle at the charge that his plays are "thin." "I shall write fat plays from now onwards," he seethes. "Fat plays filled with very fat people!"
Coward wrote the piece for Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, who were theatrical pooh-bahs all their own. The show was a hit. I've seen the reviews by Robert Benchley in The New Yorker and Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times, neither of which makes anything of the fact that Gilda hits the sack variously with Leo and Otto, that Otto and Leo look awfully intimate or that at the end they all seem headed sackward as a threesome for times to come. These days, it's all you'd hear about. But folks were more civilized then. Comparatively, we're chimps chattering about our private parts.
One member of the show's 1933 audience was the lyricist Adolph Green, 18 at the time and today himself a Broadway deity. He has described Coward's first entrance: "You kept waiting for Coward. You knew he was going to come on but you just couldn't believe he could outdo the Lunts. Then the door opened and Coward walked on and he dashed straight upstage without a word and turned his back and stood looking out a window for what seemed like half an hour. The crowd went crazy. He'd stopped the show cold."
Right there you pretty much have the key to Coward's stagecraft: at the heart of all the witty, provocative, polished brilliance is a gorgeous simplicity. Of course Coward's comic instincts told him that you can top high jinks only with silence and one sharp clean gesture. But Design for Living, like all his best work, seems to be spun out of sheer, simple nothing. Coward's plays actually are thin � but then so was Fred Astaire.
So what keeps these plays aloft � and so marvelously alive today?
Art, that's what. A rhythm that creates a style and a pattern that adumbrates a human truth. At the top of Act I, Gilda is living in Paris with Otto but sleeps with Leo. Otto interrupts. At the top of Act II, Gilda is living in London with Leo, but sleeps with Otto. Leo interrupts. Gilda runs off to New York with Ernest, the bourgeois whipping boy of the play, and Otto and Leo interrupt and Gilda goes off with both of them. Or rather, at the end of the play, she laughs with them. "They break down utterly and roar with laughter," the final stage direction says. "They groan and weep with laughter; their laughter is still echoing from the walls as � the curtain falls."
The show's geometrical sloughing and gaining of mates makes for comedy at the top of each act before a witty word has even been uttered. Comedy (no matter what lies television may tell us) is not jokes, though Coward wrote scads of brilliant ones himself. Comedy is a delightful machine, pedaled � furiously � by fools. It's a blueprint showing what idiots we can be. Gilda, Leo and Otto are the fools in question until they realize they were meant to exist not doubly but threely. And freely.
Though Design for Living might be taken for a sermon preaching bisexuality or trisexuality or pansexuality, I don't think Coward is advocating anything about sex. Later, writing of his trio's laughfest at the final curtain, Coward mused: "Some saw it as the lascivious anticipation of some sort of carnal frolic. . . . I as author, however, prefer to think that Gilda and Otto and Leo were laughing at themselves."
The play does frankly tell us to mind our own business about people's sexual arrangements. Before Ernest is cast out � rather ruthlessly � Leo says to him: "We have our own decencies. We have our own ethics. Our lives are a different shape from yours. Wave us good-bye, Little Ernest."
But Gilda, Leo and Otto don't seem to be out primarily for sex. They seem to be out for a good time, and good conversation, and a good long laugh and the freedom to enjoy it. Coward was gay in the old sense of the word, too, and, if anything, he gleefully stumped for gaiety with every word he wrote. "Life is a pleasure trip," Leo says. "A Cheap Excursion." What makes Coward an artist is that his plays do what they mean. He urges us to laugh, in plays that we can laugh at. Q.E.D.
O.K., so Coward's characters can seem arch and insufferably smug and numbingly aphoristic and self- congratulatory. There will be those who want to scale the footlights and strangle the threesome with silk. And it's true, Coward's emotions can seem like ideas of emotions, the way "I love you" seems to mean something to the French it doesn't mean to the rest of humanity. Who cares? Enjoy yourself, darling. That's what we're here for.
David Ives's new comedy, Polish Joke, will have its premiere later this season at A Contemporary Theater in Seattle.