Starring in “Design” are Garikayi Mutambirwa (left) , Brooke Bundy and Kyle T. Hester.
Photo: COOPER BATES
By LIBBY MOTIKA
Circling the News Contributor
It wasn’t until 1939 before Noel Coward’s Design for Living hit the London stage, despite having opened on Broadway seven years before. The London critics thought the play too risqué.
Coward wrote the play for his good friends Lynn Fontanne and Arthur Lunt, and he himself filled out the trio. So why was it considered risqué for the 1930s?
Probably because it concerns a trio of artistic characters, Gilda, Otto and Leo, and their complicated three-way relationship. Artistic types, Otto is a playwright whose recent work is much applauded. Leo has found success as an artist. Gilda is a free-spirited woman with a successful interior design business. The threesome are all smitten with one another. Otto loves Gilda, Leo loves Gilda, Gilda loves each of them sequentially, and the men love one another. Obviously, none of this was overt in Coward’s original production, just ripe with innuendo.
Over the years, Design for Living has been revived countless times, with many top stars taking a crack at it. The Odyssey Theatre is taking a turn. Inuendo no more. The wink winks are gone. This production in 2024 is the playground of self-absorbed, frivolous people—just the sort Coward was mocking.
Director Bart Delorenzo says he dare not compete with Coward on “the clipped delivery” and ostentatious glamour and sheen but is drawn to the artists’ throwing off the conventions of the time in work, social bonds and sexuality. “Because, really, given a blank canvas, who would ever construct a world like the one we seem to have?”
Nevertheless, Design for Living does require stars of a special luster. Now in 2024, what was witty and sophisticated in 1930 is feeling faded. The actors override this deficiency by tipping the action into one big romp.
All three acts of Design for Living contain variations on the same classic bedroom-farce premise–an unexpected entrance by a cuckolded lover but none of the betrayals really hurt. Everyone retains his “veneer” and pretends to be happy; introspection and heartbreak can be banished. Life can remain, in Leo’s words, “a pleasure trip” – “a cheap excursion.”
Design for Living is on stage at the Odyssey through August 25. Contact: 310-477-2055