Private Lives

Coward’s brittle romantic comedy may be, more than anything, a testament to the wisdom of living in sin. Elyot (Bender) and Amanda (Feagin) meet by chance five years after their divorce; they’re booked into neighboring honeymoon suites with their respective new spouses, but it’s love-at-second-sight the moment they spot one another on a shared balcony. As we learn, thanks to the new spouses’ obsessions with those who came before, Elyot and Amanda’s union was legendary in its violent fractiousness. It’s equally clear that the divorcés have entered into second matrimonies with little forethought or familiarity with their thoroughly unbefitting new partners. (“I wish I knew you better,” Amanda’s new husband tells her. “It’s just as well you don’t,” she replies.)

Bender and Feagin display aptitude for their roles—particularly Feagin, who dexterously makes Coward’s too-clever-by-half bons mots seem as if they’ve just occurred to her—but there’s far too little chemistry between them for this driven-by-passion couple. It’s as if both had earned spots on Private Lives waiting lists and got matched up with the first partner who became available, however unsuitable. Maggie Kettering and George Seegebrecht, as the new spouses, hardly register in the first act yet fare better when they return in the third. Kettering turns Sibyl into a comically whiny proto-Trixie; Seegebrecht’s Victor is too mealymouthed and milquetoast but gets in a couple of killer reactions. Overall, though, McCabe’s revival doesn’t have enough sparkle to match Coward’s Champagne comedy.

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