Hay Fever

The plot of Coward’s 1924 comedy sounds like a set-up for farce: Each member of the bohemian and slightly mad Bliss family—made up of a famous doyenne of the stage, her petulant children and their father, a hack novelist—invites one guest of the opposite sex for a weekend in the country. But in place of the expected couplings and mix-ups, Coward throws the unwitting guests into a Bliss-fueled Walpurgisnacht of chatter and self-dramatizing.

As with any Noël Coward play, there is, first, the dazzling surface—the cigarette holders and marvelous parties and witty epigrams airily delivered with cocktail in hand. But for all their insouciance, Coward’s characters are never bloodless or brittle, and productions that lose sight of this fact risk robbing the plays of their vitality and warmth (a word too often withheld from descriptions of Coward’s work). Circle Theatre’s staging of Hay Fever neatly captures the Coward manner without seeming mannered, bringing the characters to full and vibrant life.

Director Schneider achieves this with the help of Bob Knuth’s elegantly comfortable set, Suzanne Mann’s impeccable Jazz Age costumes and, above all, a pitch-perfect cast. Judith Hoppe is wonderfully off her rocker as matriarch Judith Bliss. And in matching Louise Brooks bobs, Erin Reitz as daughter Sorel Bliss and Kimberly Logan as icy Myra Arundel nicely convey, respectively, eccentricity struggling to appear respectable and its opposite, cool sophistication unraveling bit by bit.