“The Cottage” at the Helen Hayes Theater (Photo: Joan Marcus)
The curtain of the Hayes Theater rises on a stately English manner house, circa 1923. Paul Tate dePoo III’s scenic design includes all the trappings of the period: the grand staircase, the towering fireplace, the elegant bank of windows. It feels like stepping back in time to the world of Noël Coward, but the grandeur is an illusion. The Cottage, now in its Broadway debut, was written more than a century later by Sandy Rustin, an American actor and playwright. And perhaps that’s a good thing. To put it in real-estate terms: while the set might be striking, the play needs a gut renovation.
Rustin intends to put a feminist gloss on the drawing room comedy. Her script centers Sylvia (Laura Bell Bundy), a well-heeled young wife who enjoys a yearly tryst with her husband’s brother Beau (Eric McCormack). On the morning of their assignation, the pair discover that Sylvia’s husband Clarke (Alex Moffat) and Beau’s very pregnant wife Marjorie (Lilli Cooper) plan to run off together themselves. A third couple, Deirdre (Dana Steingold) and Richard (Nehal Joshi), add to the mayhem. It spoils nothing to inform you that amid all the intrigue, Sylvia gets the last laugh.
The audience, however, enjoys little mirth in the course of the overstuffed running time. Start with the script. Rustin sputters in her attempt to craft witty, period-specific dialogue—no one will mistake this for a lost Oscar Wilde manuscript. The first act seems to be about all the pithy ways a person can light a cigarette. The comedy of the second act hinges on a juvenile fart joke. The empowerment slant introduced at the end of the play feels shoehorned in, as if a contemporary perspective on women’s liberation were needed to enhance what is otherwise a lame attempt at pastiche.
The production itself also proves surprisingly inert, especially under the direction of Jason Alexander. Alexander’s reputation as a comic force in theater and television precedes him, but he supplies a low-energy staging that largely avoids physical comedy and bulldozes over any joke in its path. A series of sight gags in the second act, mostly involving McCormack using various taxidermy as weapons, is fleeting and unfunny. Nary a door slams at the right moment. For a self-styled feminist reappraisal of the genre, there is a fair amount of cheap humor at the expense of the show’s pregnant character
The actors do their best with what they have, with Moffat and Bundy turning in fully successful performances. A veteran of Saturday Night Live, Moffat understands how to milk a joke; he also uses his body in interestingly humorous ways. He also looks like a silent movie star in Sydney Maresca’s well-tailored costumes. Bundy brings a welcome gravitas to Sylvia that doesn’t entirely exist in the writing. Cooper, a fine actor, treats the material too seriously—she is as drab here as she was hilarious in last season’s POTUS. McCormack, the cast’s genuine sitcom star, proves that comedic timing doesn’t always translate in a different medium.
The style of plays that The Cottage parodies are certainly outdated and often problematic. They’re also frequently funny, and to lampoon them successfully, you must at least get that right. Although the set sparkles, one expects the house itself will soon be vacant.