 |
 |
|
|
|
|||
|
|||
 |
|||
Missed
manners
A Plum production of Noel Coward’s hilarious Hay Fever
By Brian Fitzgerald
|
|
|
|
|
| During a rehearsal of Hay Fever, guests of the Blisses, played by (left to right) Mehera Blum (CFA’03), Paul Cortez (CFA’03), Jane Bergeron (CFA’03), and Baron Vaughn (CFA’03), plot their escape from the family’s country estate. Photo by Michael Hamilton |
|
|
Move over — and out — Osbournes: the Bliss family is back.
With
apologies to Ozzy and his clan on MTV, the Blisses were here first, the
original wacky household of eccentrics to be embraced by the public.
The Bliss folks in Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, which will
be performed by CFA’s school of theatre arts from April 30 to
May 4 at the BU Theatre, “are the Osbournes of 1924,” says
director Scott Edmiston, a CFA assistant professor.
The theatrical and
offbeat Bliss family invites four straight-laced guests
to their large English country home for a weekend in the play, described
by critic John Lahr as a “comedy of bad manners.” The farce
is considered by many to be the best comedy written by Coward (1899-1973),
but “from a professional standpoint, Hay Fever is far
and away one of the most difficult plays to perform that I have ever
encountered,” Coward
said in 1934.
Edmiston, who is also an artistic associate at the Huntington
Theatre Company, Boston University’s resident theater company,
agrees with Coward’s assessment that the play isn’t easy
to pull off. “It’s
technically demanding on the actors,” he says. “The play
has very little plot, so the humor has to come out of the precision of
the comic timing of the dialogue.”
Judith Bliss, a grand and glamorous
actress, and David, her novelist husband, along with Simon and Sorel,
their bohemian son and daughter,
host four guests who are representative of traditional society, and the
Blisses proceed to baffle them with their impulsiveness and conversational
lack of restraint. “Manners are a kind of unspoken contract between
the individual and society which allows them both to function efficiently,” writes
Lahr. “Harmony, not honesty, is required for society. Manners demand
an individual put a rein on his more selfish impulses in consideration
for the feelings of others. The Blisses are constitutionally unable to
do this.”
Simon Bliss blames his parents for his outrageous behavior. “It’s
Father and Mother’s fault, really,” he says. “You see,
they’re so vague. They’ve spent their lives cultivating their
arts, and not devoting any time to ordinary conventions and manners and
things. If people don’t like it, they can lump it.”
British comedy and Boston murder
Judith and David Bliss
are played by professional guest artists Paula Plum (CFA’75) and
Richard Snee. Plum, who has appeared in such movies as Malice and Mermaids,
received the 2003 CFA Distinguished
Alumni Award, along with the 2002 Independent Reviewers of New England
Award for best actress, and the 1995 Eliot Norton Award for best actress.
Anyone who’s seen Shear Madness might find Snee familiar — his
appearances in this Boston comedy-murder mystery number 3,000.
The talented
Plum “has helped set the style and the tone for the
play,” Edmiston says. “She’s a charming comedienne,
with a particular skill for British comedy. Also, a lot of BU cast members
have spent a semester in London, so they have a sense of the British
culture and the British sensibility. They have studied British comedy
in classes, so it’s a chance to apply their classwork and their
studies abroad to a production. In many ways, I believe, this will be
a culmination of their work at Boston University.”
Hay Fever, written
in three days when Coward was 24, “is about
the modern era clashing with the stodginess of the Victorian era,” says
Edmiston. “There’s something about it that reminds me of
The Osbournes. The Blisses live in this gorgeous mansion, but
they’re
bohemian eccentrics. The play draws us in because we’re interested
in that kind of story, of people who live in an unconventional way because
they’re artists, and how they get though their daily lives. There’s
something funny about watching the Osbournes in that glorious mansion,
yelling at each other and running around in their rock and roll clothes.
Hay Fever is kind of the 1924 version of that.”
That’s
not to say that the Blisses are swearing like sailors throughout Hay
Fever. No one at the BU Theatre has to man a “bleep” button. “It’s
a play that spoofs bad manners, and now we live in a time of bad manners,” Edmiston
says. “So what was considered shockingly bad manners in 1924 no
longer seems so shocking. It’s a challenge for us, because the
values of our time are so different. Hay Fever broke all the
rules, but now that the rules have been so far broken, it’s tricky
to go back in time.”
Edmiston says that the play is still hilarious
today, however. “Rehearsals
have been a lot of fun,” he says. “Rehearsing Hay Fever is
like having a glass of champagne. It’s sparkling, witty, and effervescent.
Performances of Hay Fever will take place at the Boston
University Theatre, 264 Huntington Ave., on Wednesday, April 30, at
7:30 p.m., Thursday,
May 1, at 7:30 p.m., Friday, May 2, and Saturday, May 3, at 8 p.m., and
Sunday, May 4, at 2 p.m. Tickets are $10 for the general public, $8 for
BU alumni, and $5 for Huntington Theatre Company subscribers and senior
citizens. BU students, faculty, and staff receive one free ticket with
BU ID at the door on the day of the performance, subject to availability.
For more information, call the BU Theatre box office at 617-266-0800.
25
April
2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations