Life as artists design it

Every play bears the indelible fingerprints of its maker, but “Design for Living” has its maker’s DNA. Noel Coward not only put his friends, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, into the story, he wrote the third major role for himself. Together they opened the play’s first successful run on Broadway in 1933 (London wasn’t yet ready for a blatant challenge to convention) thus realizing a plan made a decade earlier.

Some celestial playwright must have invented them. Imagine these three ferociously ambitious and just as ferociously gifted young people embedded in New York boarding houses, spinning dreams, laying plans. They had their blueprint for the future in front of them. Coward would be the modern world’s greatest playwright and Lunt and Fontanne would be the First Couple of the American stage. No doubt they toasted this proclamation with gin. It was 1921. In less than 10 years, it had all come true.

Michael Kahn directs “Design for Living,” STC’s first presentation of Coward. Aided by top drawer technical support, the three principals move the action briskly through time and space, though the play itself, with intermissions, is nearly three hours.

The elegant sometime designer Gilda (Gretchen Egolf) lives with Otto in a shabby, Parisian artist’s loft but is having an affair with their best friend Leo. Otto (Tom Story) doesn’t take this news with quite the bohemian sangfroid they were counting on and storms off. Leo, a playwright (Robert Sella), and Gilda continue the affair in London where they both grow successful and rich — Leo more than Gilda. He leaves town, Otto drops in, all change partners. There’s more, of course.

Coward, a homosexual in an age when one’s orientation was either assumed or kept darkly secret, had much to say about the way people lived their lives. Square pegs should not be forced into round holes; “we’ve got to find our own solutions for our own peculiar moral problems,” in the words of Otto. And they do, startling even the more insouciant of that roaring generation, namely Ernest (Kevin Hogan), an avuncular art collector who also lays claim to Gilda.

Everything that could possibly be associated with Coward is here in plenty: the wit, the easy banter, the gleaming style — but it isn’t “Private Lives.” More than anything else he wrote, “Design for Living” pleads a case for “lives diametrically opposed to ordinary social conventions.” That case is made with the convincing balance of Egoli, Story and Sella. What Ernest blasts as a “three-sided erotic hodge-podge” before slamming the door reveals itself to be more of menage a trois for over-achievers.

Love among the artists is never easy, but this combination of ambitious, sexually aggressive and devoted friends creates a powder keg of anticipation. Put any two together in a room anywhere and await the fireworks. Perhaps the most entertaining scene occurs when Leo and Otto, having both been ditched by the fickle Gilda, graduate from making belligerent threats to drinking brotherly toasts to falling drunkenly in a happy heap.

James Noone has outdone himself on the scene design. The shabby Paris loft is exchanged for a sleek London apartment (they have reputations after all), which later moves to a gilded New York penthouse. Subtle lighting design by Mark McCullough completes a set that had its Washington audience bursting into spontaneous applause.

While the trio’s material rise in the world is reflected by their surroundings, their dress, even their expectations of life, it is also seen in their frustrations and petty rages at the very celebrity hunters who so vividly represent the downside of success. Gilda is particularly alert to what the changes, both in her status and her live-in partners, mean to her personal integrity, and this ambivalence leads to a conclusion that is more than satisfying — one that makes you want to join the friendship pretzel on the couch.

Also in his element is Robert Perdziola with costume designs that make the mouth water. Of course our young heros have slender, perfectly designed bodies to match, but they are a joy to contemplate in their serenely Art Deco surroundings.

You will not often see a well-mounted production of “Designs for Living,” and you will never see one better than this. It is, as Coward might deign to observe, simply mah-valous, dahling.

Margaret Lawrence is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association. She teaches drama at CCHS.

Want to go?
What: “Design for Living” By Noel Coward
Where: Shakespeare Theatre Co. Lansburgh Theatre, Washington, D.C.
Call: (202) 547-1122 or visit ShakespeareTheatre.org.
Playing through June 28