Just a few moments right here trace at that risk, as when Sylvia says, “So, you caught a mustache on a mustache and adjusted your identify to Richard?” — a line that’s each completely logical in context and logic’s excellent reverse outdoors it. And Moffat’s excessive character selections, together with postures that discover him tied up in pretzels along with his ft en pointe, practically flip this “Saturday Night time Stay” clown’s efficiency into fashionable dance.
However these are squibs; they zoom up, pop briefly and fizzle. Regardless of the forged’s principally elegant work — Bundy and the self-mocking McCormack constantly hit their marks — the script and what looks like Alexander’s desperation to maintain issues aloft inevitably allow them to down. I’m not, for example, conscious of a scene in Coward involving 30 seconds of earsplitting flatulence. Nor do the stinger chords that announce every new character’s entrance encourage confidence within the manufacturing’s style self-discipline.
“The Cottage” is subsequently extra of a spoof than a farce, and fewer a spoof of Coward or Wilde than of Feydeau, cleaning soap operas and middlebrow adultery comedies of the Seventies like “6 Rms Riv Vu” and “Similar Time, Subsequent 12 months.” Kind of efficiently, all of them used humor to assuage the sexual anxieties of their instances by displaying how characters twisted into agonies of jealousy and need would possibly however come to a great finish.
Rustin needs to do one thing comparable by introducing three extra amatory issues, together with Dierdre (Dana Steingold) and Richard (Nehal Joshi), about whom it could be unfair to say extra. In numerous methods they lead Sylvia, who progressively turns into the middle of the play, to reject the standard assumptions that too usually entice girls in loveless marriages. Creating this feminist angle on Coward, Rustin name-checks the English suffragist chief Emmeline Pankhurst and attracts on a shock occasion of intergenerational sisterhood to resolve the plot.
Although the misogyny of synthetic social establishments (and performs) isn’t precisely information, I used to be glad of this improvement in idea, and impressed with Bundy’s means to hold it off on the just-right midpoint between foolish and severe. However after all of the temporizing and flatulating earlier, the last-minute arrival of a degree appeared, nicely, inappropriate. Had I laughed greater than twice within the play’s earlier 119 minutes, I would even have discovered it humorous.
The CottageThrough Oct. 29 on the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; thecottageonbroadway.com. Operating time: 2 hours.
