Sylvia (Laura Bell Bundy) and Beau (Eric McCormack) discuss their future in The Cottage (photo by Joan Marcus)
THE COTTAGE
Hayes Theater
240 West Forty-Fourth St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 29, $109-$169
thecottageonbroadway.com
“Why do I have a sense of impending disaster?” a character asks early in Tom Stoppard’s 1981 farce, On the Razzle. “One false move and we could have a farce on our hands.”
The best farces build comedy around impending disasters, usually involving class and romance, from Noël Coward’s Present Laughter and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest to Michael Frayn’s Noises Off and Molière’s The Miser. But the less-successful farces are hampered by too many false moves.
Sandy Rustin’s 2014 drawing room comedy of manners, The Cottage, which opened July 24 at the Hayes Theater on Broadway, starts off well enough. As the audience enters the space, the stage is covered by a screen depicting the image of a colorful, idyllic cottage covered in plants and flowers — as well as several pairs of animals engaged in overt sexual behavior; a bra dangles from a tree branch, hinting at what is going on inside. The screen is then raised to reveal Paul Tate dePoo III’s wonderful set, which deservedly gets its own applause. The large room is filled with elegant furniture, sculptures, books, paintings, a bar, a globe, a gramophone, and seemingly endless knickknacks.
It’s June 1923, and Beau (Eric McCormack) is at his family’s cottage in the English countryside, in the midst of his annual tryst with Sylvia (Laura Bell Bundy), which has been going on for seven years. Sylvia is ready to take their relationship to the next level, but Beau is apprehensive.
An all-star cast cannot save the Broadway debut of The Cottage (photo by Joan Marcus)
“I wish you were my husband,” she says.
“If I were your husband you would despise me just as you despise Clarke and you would spend your evenings wishing to make love to him and not me,” Beau replies, referring to his brother, Clarke (Alex Moffat), who is married to Sylvia. “Romance, my dear, is for fairy tales. This is not a romance. This is sex,” Beau adds. “Un-wifely sex.”
Beau is none-too-thrilled when Sylvia announces that she has sent telegrams to both Clarke and Marjorie (Lilli Cooper), Beau’s wife, revealing the affair. Clarke and Marjorie soon arrive separately with secrets of their own, followed by Dierdre (Dana Steingold), a whirling dervish who is in love with Beau and is worried that her husband, Richard (Nehal Joshi), will find out where she is and kill him — but not before they all have some fun. “I didn’t expect a party. Will there be games?” Dierdre declares. The fun and games take a drastic downturn in the far-less-effective second act.
Subtitled “A Romantic and (Not Quite) Murderous Comedy of Manners,” The Cottage could be renamed The Farce That Goes Wrong. The all–North American cast (McCormack is Canadian) speaks in overly dramatic British accents. Many of the props offer surprise jokes that quickly become repetitive, while others are just plain head scratchers — antlers, I’m talking about you.
The play, gleefully helmed by the Tony-winning, Emmy-nominated Jason Alexander (Seinfeld, Jerome Robbins’ Broadway) in his directorial debut, does have its fair share of amusing exchanges, particularly in the first act, and there were two genuinely funny moments that appeared to be spontaneous, one involving a shoe, the other a bunch of grapes, resulting in the actors trying their best to hold back their own laughter and failing wonderfully. Unfortunately, there was not nearly enough of that.
Sydney Maresca’s costumes are appropriately genteel, from Clarke’s tweed suit to Sylvia’s white negligee to Beau’s smoking jacket. Justin Ellington’s sound design is overwhelmed by the actors speaking way too loud, which often impacts the believability of the plot; numerous times, characters have discussions they don’t want others to hear, but it’s hard to believe that a person knocking at the front door can’t hear what two people are saying as they shout right on the other side.
The cast is all in, but the lack of subtlety drags the show down; it might have worked better as a ninety-minute one-act instead of two hours with intermission. The actors, particularly Saturday Night Live veteran Moffat and Steingold (Beetlejuice, Avenue Q), display a talent for physical comedy, but a gaggle of gags feels tossed in purely for giggles, not organic to the story. A stage farce needs to be clever and witty first, without the pratfalls, in order to capture the audience; otherwise, as with The Cottage, you end up with an overlong episode of a mediocre sitcom or SNL skit.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]