Skip These: City Lit's 'Private Lives' and 'Old Times'

By Julienne Bilker in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 6, 2009 8:40PM

Though we’d never seen a City Lit show before, we were intrigued when we heard the company would be running Noël Coward’s Private Lives and Harold Pinter’s Old Times in repertory. These are difficult scripts by playwrights with well-known, specific styles, so we were anxious to see how these guys would meet the challenge of producing both with one director, a few shared actors, and the same set. It pains us to say this, but the answer is: they didn’t.

In Private Lives, Amanda (Cameron Feagin) and Elyot (Don Bender), a divorced couple, run into each other while honeymooning with their new spouses, rediscover their love for each other, and take off together. We then watch their relationship crumble as they realize what drove them apart in the first place, although they end up together in the end. It’s a good premise with witty writing - but that may be the biggest problem. The actors play for comedy rather than realism, sacrificing full character development and going for obvious laughs rather than subtlety. The latter would provide a much larger payoff.

The other major issue here is tension, in that it’s sorely lacking - the intimacy between Amanda and Elyot isn’t believable, so it’s not all that startling when the pair’s tender moments turn into screaming matches. The sigh of relief we breathe when the fights end isn’t because we’ve been biting our nails hoping the tension will break, it’s because we’re tired of listening to people yell - and with no level between calm and frenetic, there’s a lot of yelling. It’s tedious, exhausting and mildly dizzying, as the lights constantly shift from cool to warm and back again in what we guess is an attempt to support the emotional changes onstage. Instead, this strange design choice epitomizes the over-simplification of the entire piece.

Old Times is a far more subdued play. Anna (Feagin) comes to visit former roommate Kate (Gianine DeFrancesco) and her husband Deeley (Bender), and ends up competing with Deeley for Kate. Bender finds comedy in his role more naturally than in Private Lives, but there is a similar lack of subtlety in his decision to play Deeley, scripted to be in his early forties, as an angry old man who wants Anna to get off his proverbial lawn. Although Feagin’s Anna is more intriguing than her Private Lives Amanda, she could use more fire in her voice and knives in her eyes to communicate the threat she poses. As “dreamer” Kate, DeFrancesco captures an air of mystery, but it’s vague instead of mesmerizing. As the rivalry between Anna and Deeley escalates, it seems the script is pulling the actors along. Kate eventually shuts both of them down, rendering Anna silent and reducing Deeley to tears, but neither moment is particularly jarring.

On the first page of City Lit’s program for both plays, there is a Pinter quote about directing a Coward piece. Although it appears on the Private Lives title page, we think it applies to both pieces. “I thought it’d be fun to do. And it wasn’t fun to do. It was very hard to do.” And to that, we say: no kidding.