Love with the Improper Stranger – A Review of “The Cottage”

By Timothy Ruppert

Romantic intrigues, marital betrayals, and a “slightly loaded gun” figure among the innumerable twists and turns comprising Sandy Rustin’s period-comedy The Cottage, a play in which deceptions abound and secrets get revealed like Matroyshka dolls opened one after another after another. Taking place in 1920s England, this one-set, continuous-action show gives us three couples whose passions shift with the speed of an oncoming train in the London Underground. Note, though, that The Cottage is more than a map of infidelities. Beyond its musical-chairs hilarity, the play tells an important story of women’s empowerment, all the while evoking the style, milieu, and satiric wizardry of Noël Coward, particularly as we find these in plays such as Hay Fever and Fallen Angels. Accordingly, The Cottage demands intelligent interpretation and resourceful staging. The Bobcat Players prove eminently suited to this task, showing great thought and greater heart in bringing Rustin’s play so lovingly to life in a show under no circumstances to be missed.

Keith Zagorski, a talent long associated with Bobcat, sagely directs The Cottage so that the play’s high-velocity humor does not ultimately overwhelm the crucial messages at its core. The time-faithful set and beautiful costumes (credit the latter to Patti Ross) effectively place us in the English countryside of a century ago. Thus transported through time and space, we discover a cast of smart performers who know when silly is fun and when absurdity is life-changing. Even as our six characters surprise us with redirected affections, delight us with hurried defenses, and appall us with easy cruelties, we never lose the thread of what this play has to say with respect to women’s rights and power. As the well-off Beau Van Kipness, Jeff Carey nicely delivers aristocratic insouciance spiced with an Oliver Hardy-like impatience at the ever-steepening antics.

Andrew Mayle, as Beau’s brother Clarke, successfully embodies the “Baldwin conservative” whose reasonableness quietly smacks of the reactionary. Bridget Yeager sparks laughs with her Marjorie, who, seemingly moments away from going into labor, juxtaposes dour propriety and indelicate physical comedy. Kat Bowman as Dierdre brings high spirits and unflagging sincerity. As Richard, the ever-likeable Bruce Travers finds nuance and humaneness in a character purported to be a cold-blooded murderer.

At the center of this group is Sylvia Van Kipness, played with Lynn Fontanne-flourish by Erin Berger. Berger’s exceptional performance grounds the quirky whimsicality of the goings-on with a worldliness that lends gravitas to the tangled affairs pursued by this flighty collection of lovers. In effect, her Sylvia functions as both chorus and protagonist, commenting on and interpreting the romantic chaos to which she ongoingly contributes. Berger ensures that we see in Sylvia the intelligence and autonomy needed for the play’s anti-patriarchal challenge, fully revealed late in Act Two, to work. With her delightful castmates, Berger guides the play’s trajectory from fluff and farce to this moment of lasting empowerment.

With Sandy Rustin’s The Cottage, The Bobcat Players give us a vibrant, laugh-out-loud play that strikes me as a perfect way, after a fierce winter, to celebrate springtime’s return. The production is charming and clever, and I daresay Noël Coward would approve.

-TR

“The Cottage” runs until March 28 at the Ed Schaughency Theatre, Beaver Area Senior High School, 1 Gypsy Glen Road, Beaver, PA, 15009. For tickets and additional information, please visit https://www.bobcatplayers.com/tickets.