Private Lives
Reviewed by Katie Buenneke
Independent Shakespeare Company
Through May 7
It’s a delightfully genius idea, really—casting a married couple, two stalwarts of the LA theater scene, as the bickering central couple in a 1930 Noel Coward play. And that is exactly what the Independent Shakespeare Company has done, pitting Melissa Chalsma, the company’s artistic director and co-founder, against David Melville, the company’s managing director and other co-founder.
For those unfamiliar with the plot, Private Lives is a more pleasant progenitor of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, where one bickering couple make the lives of everyone around them miserable. Here, Elyot (Melville) and Amanda (Chalsma) divorced five years ago, and have since remarried; Elyot to the histrionic Sibyl (Asha Noel Iyer), and Amanda to the upstanding Victor (Brent Charles). The situation for the comedy is that they’re both on beachy honeymoons at the same time, in rooms right next to each other. Amanda soon notices that Elyot is next door, and they both realize that they are still attracted to each other, with no regard for the consequences.
But of course, there are consequences, both in their relationships with each other, and in their relationships with their spouses. As the three acts of the play unfold, we see the cyclical nature and devolution of these kinds of push-and-pull relationships.
At moments, the play is an absolute delight. Melville seems born to play a Coward crank, and really shines in the role. Chalsma is charming, especially when Amanda is at her most flustered. Charles is also strong as Victor, a gentleman who reaches his breaking point as things cycle out of control. Unfortunately, even though it’s a farce, both Iyer as Sibyl and Norlani Estevez as Louise’s performances feel a little broad for the small venue.
Director Nikhil Pai has transposed the piece from Europe circa 1930 to California and Mexico in the 1950s, with a few geographic and pop culture updates to the script. Aside from a different kind of glamor (which really comes to life when the set transforms after intermission, in the show’s second and third acts), I didn’t find that this added much to the piece. There are quite a few British turns of phrase in the script that sounded out of place in American accents (Melville, being from the U.K., is the only cast member using a British accent). I think there’s also a kind of intangible reserved stuffiness to the characters which makes their antics even more comedic, but that gets lost in making most of the characters American.
The pacing also seems off-kilter, though some of that may be due to the text itself. Still, the audience was told multiple times before the show that it would run 90 minutes, but Thursday’s 7:30 p.m. showing (which started closer to 7:40) did not end until nearly 10 p.m., and that unaccounted-for hour made its presence known.
Still, the Independent Shakespeare Company’s production of Private Lives makes for a charming night. It’s fun to watch silly people fight inconsequentially (though the entire play is bickering, there’s only one moment, towards the end of the second act, where the fighting feels emotionally real, but the tone quickly shifts back to frivolity).
Independent Shakespeare Company, 3191 Casitas Ave. Ste 130, Atwater Village; Thurs.- Sat., 7:30 pm.; Sun., 2 pm; through May 7. https://iscla.org. Running time: two hours and twenty-five minutes, including a 15-minute intermission.
