Playwright: Noel Coward/Harold Pinter. At: City Lit Theater at Edgewater Presbyterian Church, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr. Phone: 773-293-3682; $25. Runs through: May 3. Photo by Johnny Knight
A distinctive feature of perfect companionship, according to the late Carolyn Heilbrun, is "the continuing possibility of conversation." In these strikingly dissimilar plays by English playwrights Noel Coward and Harold Pinter, we meet two long-married couples confronted by issues rooted in the past that, for better or worse, guarantees that their futures together will never be boring.
In Private Lives, Coward presents us with Elyot and Amanda—married for three years, divorced for five, both recently wedded to second partners, only to discover on their respective honeymoons that they were meant for each other. Pinter's Old Times introduces us to Deeley, a husband racked with jealousy, despite 20 years of marriage, by the pre-marital bond between his enigmatic wife and her girlhood friend, Anna.
Standard interpretations of Coward's witty romantic comedies play them for madcap giddiness, frozen-lipped caricatures swapping repartee at warp speed with no more moral introspection than a hit squad spraying the room with verbal tommyguns. Director Terry McCabe, however, recognizes the need for us to like his caddish lovers and to that purpose, has instructed his principal players to search for textual clues to their personae's gradual progress toward mutual compatibility—as contrasted to the shallow second spouses, hopelessly mired down in stubborn prejudices.
Pinter's minimalist dialogue, on the other hand, too often provides troupers an invitation to glut themselves on introspective silences untempered by any regard for audiences stranded outside the subtextual continuity. But under McCabe's direction, the two adversaries dueling for the affections of the passive women they both covet forge a steely undercurrent that never lets up, but instead holds us riveted right up to the author's characteristically cryptic ending.
City Lit Theater's twin productions, running in repertory, are a veritable showcase for storefront-circuit favorites Don Bender and Cameron Feagin, who generate a chemistry, reminiscent of Cary Grant ( well, David Niven, maybe ) and Katherine Hepburn, to unite Elyot and Amanda as much in their irrepressible candor as in their penchant for grand passions and flying fisticuffs. Both acquit themselves just as skillfully in the roles of the professorially rumpled Deeley and the swinging post-war bachelorette Anna. Supporting actors Maggie Kettering, George Seegebrecht, Gianine DeFrancesco and Shawna Tucker all do their part, assisted by impeccable dialects and an uncredited score of carefully selected incidental music, but Bender and Feagin are the reason to reserve your tickets without delay.