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The Vortex
Reviewed by Bill Raden
Matrix Theatre
Through Dec 14
To some degree, any stage revival outside of an academic setting constitutes an argument that the work in question continues to offer some smattering of social or political or human truth relevant to a contemporary audience. Plays that routinely win their arguments, such as avowed masters like Shakespeare, Chekhov, Beckett or the Greek tragedians, are canonized as works of cherished art.
Those that lose their power to persuade, like so much of the 50-play oeuvre of Noel Coward — whose acid wit and arch artifice are so synonymous with the prewar comedy-of-manners that it earned the adjective, Cowardian — settle to the wayside reserved for the ersatz and the guilty pleasure.
But not if director Gene Franklin Smith can help it. Smith’s adroit staging of The Vortex, which is currently enjoying a remount at the Matrix (it debuted at the Malibu Playhouse in April), makes a game if eventually less-than-convincing case that Coward deserves reappraisal as a heavyweight 20th century dramatist.
The Vortex is Coward’s calculatedly salacious, 1924 plunge into the decadence of Britain’s Roaring Twenties café society that became an instant succès de scandale and launched the then obscure 24-year-old actor to world renown as a playwright. And while the play’s melodramatic pitch is atypical for Coward, its creaking drawing room conventions, sophisticated banter, tabloid sensationalism and risqué whisper of ambisexuality among the narcissistic, self-dramatizing grotesques that populate it are all decidedly familiar Cowardian tropes and archetypes.
Chief among the latter is middle-aged socialite Florence Lancaster (Shannon Holt), an aging, supremely self-absorbed party girl and serial adulterer whose most tongue-wagging break with social convention is her preference for lovers 20 years her junior. Florence’s current obsession is lunky hunk Tom Veryan (Daniel Jimenez), who she insensitively flaunts in the face of her stoical husband, David (marvelously underplayed by John Mawson).
Florence’s delusional disconnect with age- and gender-appropriate behavior takes a double hit with the return from Paris of Nicky (Craig Robert Young), Florence’s flamboyantly dissolute prodigal son, and his announcement of his betrothal to Bunty Mainwaring (Skye LaFontaine).
Florence soon finds the “beastly vortex” of her existence unraveling amid the pronounced ambivalence of all the lovers, while the psychically maiming consequences of her thoughtless abandon get driven home in an Oedipal climax famously lifted from Gertrude’s closet in Hamlet.
To better frame his case that the proceedings are something more than overwrought histrionics, Smith loosens the text from some of its mustier dramaturgical constrictions by trimming some incidental and stock characters, and he updates the action (and music) from the mid-‘20s to 1965 (on Erin Walley’s modish living room sets). And while the streamline gets off to a rocky start with an almost camp homage to the old Laugh-In TV show, Smith’s smartest choice proves to be his high-octane cast.
Holt delivers an affecting, outsized portrait finely balanced between emotional gargoyle and a woman capable of fascinating someone like Tom. Young more than holds his own in a performance that convincingly suggests the kind of conflicted inner torment that, in a Coward play at least, dare never speak its name. Victoria Hoffman and Cameron Mitchell, Jr. lend first-rate support, respectively, as Florence’s truth-teller confidante and her sycophantically enabling friend.
But not even the salesmanship of the ablest ensemble can finally save Coward from his own cripplingly counterfeit tendencies. Where Wilde or Shaw wouldn’t have let the slightest whiff of moral hypocrisy to go unchallenged or un-subverted, Coward allows the play’s boatload of audience-implicating, petit-bourgeois prejudices to go completely unexamined. While that may have been a shrewd tactic for West End commercial success in the 1920s, what he left for posterity continues to be so much reactionary kitsch.
Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Ave., Hlywd.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; through Dec. 14. (323) 960-7735, www.plays411.com/vortex.
