Laguna Playhouse Exposes ‘Private Lives’

Which love is better? The passionate, tumultuous roller-coaster kind, where the highs are ever so euphoric and full of ecstasy, but are always mixed with deep lows of screaming matches, jealous rages and even disgust? Or the amiable, polite kind—the nice-enough love that sails along steadily with ease, no rip currents, but without many heart-thumping, arms-in-the-air moments either?

Noël Coward seems to ponder this question in Private Lives, currently on stage at . Although he wrote it in 1931, his depiction of a couple’s obsessive, volatile relationship is still relevant enough to pique the interest of theater audiences in 2011.

Amanda (a stunning Julie Granata) and Elyot (the seasoned Joseph Fuqua) are an upper-crust couple who divorced five years ago. As fate would have it, the two end up in the same French hotel on their honeymoons—with new spouses—and adjoining balconies.

While Amanda’s new husband, the stiff, humorless Victor, and Elyot’s new wife, a naïve, youthful Sybil, are occupied in their suites, Amanda and Elyot’s private lives suddenly become public when they discover each other on the balcony. They start with some polite chit-chat about their new marriages, resisting lingering feelings at first, then finally giving in to passion. Of course—they never stopped loving one another.

They impetuously decide to abandon their new spouses by running away to Amanda’s Paris villa. By holing up in private, they hope to discover if, this time, their love can withstand the odds.

Sheltered from the outside world in Paris, they rekindle the fire on a week-long tryst. After a few days, old habits start to creep in. Overindulgence leads to flippant alcohol-induced remarks, which start to sting.

So when the episodes of über-adoration and love somehow morph into ugliness and fighting, the couple invent a code word—“sullex”—signaling a self-imposed timeout, no speaking, until they are ready to play nice again. After a few predictable turns like this, jealously, indignation and even domestic violence finally take over and “sullex” is powerless. At the peak of total chaos, enter the rebuffed Victor and Sybil.

Matthew Floyd Miller portrays Victor, a buttoned-up, follow-the-rules type of fellow who tries to to cover his total devastation and rejection. The exasperated Sybil, deftly played by Winslow Corbett, does her best to sort things out, but it all leads to only more objects being thrown. Essentially every character ends up wondering if what they had with their spouses was really love at all.

Coward’s play, directed by former Laguna Playhouse artistic director Andrew Barnicle, is a perennial favorite among theaters, and continues to enjoy mainstage performances around the world. It’s a testament to how audiences continue to eat up Coward’s witty banter and sparring dialogue. The entire story line, rather thin, has only two locations and four characters, putting the spotlight on the endless deliberation about their relationships.

So, do Amanda and Elyot get their “happily ever after?” Amanda emerges the next morning, smiling and sunny, behaving as though nothing happened. Her exterior is inadequate, though, to cover the underlying pain and embarrassment. Elyot, too, reappears, seeming nonchalant about the previous day’s events. Is there a crumb of emotion left to salvage the relationship?

The actors all give skillful performances, with superb English accents, and Coward’s crisp dialogue is true to their characters’ elite class.

The overriding question now is not which kind of love is better, but whether that manic, obsessive love is actually love at all. In spite of the insults, the screaming, the fighting—in their own tender private moments, just Amanda and Elyot, do you call that love, even if it’s just for a second?

Private Lives runs at the Laguna Playhouse through April 10. To purchase tickets online, visit www.lagunaplayhouse.com.