Design for Living by Noël Coward, Austin Shakespeare at the Rollins Theatre, Long Center, February 6 - 24, 2013

by Christine El-Tawil and Michael Meigs

Kara Bliss greets you with song as you enter the Rollins Studio Theater at the Long Center for Austin Shakespeare’s production of Design for Living by Noël Coward. Jason Connor accompanies her on the upright piano. 


 Bliss’s soulful delivery of witty and fun compositions by Coward and by Cole Porter instantly transports you to the 1920’s. The puns and clever humor set the audience laughing even before the action began, particularly with references to “gay” behavior. In Coward’s time, “gay” usually meant “loose” or “sexually libertarian” rather than “homosexual,” but our 21^st-century audience took the modern meaning. Director Ann Ciccolella’s interpretation of the progressive partnering within this free-thinking trio was exactly in line with that modern understanding.


Bliss and Connor perform before the show and at each of two intermissions in this three-hour production. They function as a cheerful and attractive chorus, for the songs allude to themes and social issues explored throughout the play. Their final offering is Coward’s “Marvelous Party,” an account of lovely drunken frivolity foreshadowing the happy ending.

Michael Miller, Martin Burke, Helen Merino (photo: Austin Shakespeare)

Coward wrote the play in 1932 for his friends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, and the three of them appeared in it in New York to great acclaim. London audiences didn’t get to see it until much later because the ménage-à-trois and sexual innuendo were judged inappropriate by British authorities.


Design for Living tells the story of three young aspiring artists struggling up from poverty. They’re firm friends who first met in bohemian Paris. At the opening, Helen Merino as Gilda the designer is in a terrible flutter, and we soon discover why. Living unmarried with one of her male friends, she has just spent the night with the other. 


The dilemmas of sentiment and coupling are the heart of the play; these spirits scorn convention but jealousies upset and bewilder them. The three protagonists portrayed this drama and comedy so powerfully and effortlessly that the audience found itself gasping one moment and then laughing in the same breath.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Hay Fever by Noël Coward, North by Northwest Theatre Company at the City Theatre, May 22 - June 7

Bernadette Nason sparkles like pink champagne in this amusing, silly piece written by "the master" Noël Coward when he was a mere boy of 25.

Hay Fever lightly chronicles the start of a weekend at a country house near London, property of the Bliss family -- David is a novelist, Judith is an actress who recently said her adieux to the London stage and their children Simon and Sorel have no identifiable professions or preoccupations.

They all have artistic temperaments and a cheerful disregard for social niceties. As Sorel says to her brother in the first scene, "You're right about us being slapdash, Simon. I wish we weren't." His reply: "It's not our fault -- it's the way we've been brought up."

That impulsiveness and disregard applies to relations within the family, as well.

Click to read more on AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .