Love among the artists: Leo and Gilda and Otto in ‘Design for Living’

From left, Garikayi Mutambirwa, Brooke Bundy, and Kyle T. Hester / Cooper Bates

LOS ANGELES — Odyssey Theatre Ensemble is presenting a spicy adaptation of Noël Coward’s salaciously audacious, eyebrow-raising ribald romp Design for Living.

During the 1930s, as the Great Depression and rise of fascism devastated and threatened the world, a genre called “Proletarian Theater” entered Broadway, stage left. This pro-worker trend included Clifford Odets’s landmark Waiting for Lefty, a 1935 Group Theatre production about the unionization struggle of cab drivers that ended with the cast leading audiences in chanting “Strike! Strike! Strike!” In 1937, John Howard Lawson’s Marching Song—about workers in an auto plant planning a sit-down strike—and Marc Blitzstein’s Orson Welles-directed pro-labor The Cradle Will Rock shook the Great White Way. Revolution was in the air.

Culturally, too. Before these proletarian plays premiered, Noël Coward’s Design for Living found its way to the boards at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre January 24, 1933. Days later Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. In that context, some might dismiss Coward’s take on the sex life of artists to be a blithe Bohemian bourgeois bagatelle and frolic. While playwrights such as Odets, Lawson and Blitzstein focused on bread-and-butter subjects, Coward dramatized bedroom matters and manners. Yet he was, in his own way, radical in terms of an uncompromising critique of heterosexual monogamous relationships as the prevailing social norm.

In essence, the plot for Design for Living is that interior designer Gilda (Brooke Bundy), painter Otto (Garikayi Mutambirwa) and playwright Leo (Kyle T. Hester) are more than mere fast friends. Indeed, much to the consternation of the more straitlaced characters, including stodgy housekeeper Miss Hodge (Sheelagh Cullen) and the uptight art dealer Ernest Friedman (Andrew Elvis Miller), they are indeed a threesome. At first, Gilda, Otto and Leo are struggling artistes in London, but then fortune smiles upon them. Coward’s two-act comedy also includes some insightful ruminations on the nature of success in capitalist society. And consider this lament from Gilda:

“The human race is a let-down, Ernest; a bad, bad let-down! I’m disgusted with it. It thinks it’s progressed but it hasn’t; it thinks it’s risen above the primeval slime but it hasn’t—it’s still  wallowing in it! It’s still clinging to us, clinging to our hair and our eyes and our souls. We’ve  invented a few small  things that make noises,  but we haven’t invented one big thing that creates  quiet, endless peaceful  quiet….”

Be that as it may, Design’s main preoccupation is what Otto jocularly calls “Love among the artists.” Coward’s brazen dramatization—and glamorization—of a ménage-a-trois was banned in his native England until 1939. Ernst Lubitsch adapted Design for the silver screen with a pre-Code but nonetheless tamer Hollywood version (co-written by Ben Hecht), starring Gary Cooper, Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins that appeared just before the end of the year 1933. The current iteration at the Odyssey Theatre has presumably taken the liberty of making explicit what may have been implicit in Coward’s original text—a gay and/or bisexual subtext.

The British bard was, in his, ahem, private life, a closeted homosexual at a time when “the love that dares not speak its name” was criminalized and strictly verboten. Coward clearly used the Gilda, Otto and Leo threesome as a coded way to challenge romantic/marital norms. Had he come out explicitly in favor of same-sex hanky-panky in 1933, the celebrated playwright would likely have faced dire consequences. So, he used a ménage-à-trois to harpoon heteronormative conventions and bourgeois constraints. (Although, it should be noted, in 1933 New York Times reviewer Brooks Atkinson did call Design a “gay bit of drollery”—that adjective already understood as a sexual innuendo.)

Of course, Coward, who was noted for his “sophistication” and “style” (now there’s a pair of “code” words for you!), did it with great wit, which helped the play—written originally for those toasts of the town, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontane—become a highly successful Broadway hit that co-starred Coward himself.

As a worthy successor to George Bernard Shaw as a master of dialogue and social criticism, the bard’s bon mots and ripostes fly fast and furious in this production helmed by veteran director Bart DeLorenzo. The word slingers include slinky Brooke Bundy, who is throughout much of the two-hour play sensuously clad in a clingy negligee-type outfit by Design’s costume designer Denise Blasor, sure to keep theatergoers from feeling blasé. Mutambirwa and Hester prove themselves to be jesters, too, with some deft physical comedy involving brandy and sherry. As the housekeeper Miss Hodge, the Irish-born Cullen creates one of the stage’s best cleaning ladies since Carol Burnett, who is a disapproving, traditionalist foil to the nonconformist trio’s violations of British propriety. Newcomer Shireen Heidari also acquits herself well in the second act as a memorable Helen Carver, wife of the snobby Henry Carver (Max Pescherine). But it is Ms. Bundy as the designing woman who steals the show (along with both guys), imparting a sense of joie de vivre at being the apex of a very sexy triangle.

Just a few minor things worth pointing out about this production which, like the original rendition, seems set in the early 1930s. Mutambirwa is Black; we presumably know from the first Broadway run that Otto, portrayed by Coward, was conceived as a Caucasian character. Had a Black actor played the part in 1933 America, co-romancing the white Gilda, there would have been major racial ramifications. The stage has advanced so much since then that Otto’s ethnicity isn’t an issue in the current edition of Coward’s comedy and never directly remarked upon.

I do take issue, however, with Leo and Otto’s re-appearance at Gilda’s Manhattan penthouse in, as I recall, black tie and white shirts, saying that they just returned from a voyage aboard a freighter to far-flung corners of the globe. As somebody who has journeyed on freighters to distant South Seas isles such as Helen Reef, Kapingamarangi, Nukuoro, Nuku Hiva and Pitcairn Island, I can assure you that none of the passengers or crewmen wore ties, black or otherwise.

But obviously this is a mere quibble that should not deter those who love cleverly written and delivered dialogue from enjoying Noël Coward’s subversive assault on our staid sexual standards and mores. And for those who criticize Coward for dramatizing Bohemian blithe spirits’ morality (or lack of) at the same time Odets tackled unionization, it’s worth remembering that Coward wrote, directed and starred in one of the classic World War II morale boosters, 1942’s In Which We Serve. As for now, what audiences are being served at the Odyssey is a deliciously delightful Design for Living for more adventurous theatergoers.

Design for Living runs Weds., July 17 and Aug. 7 only at 8:00; Fri. and Sat. at 8:00 p.m. and Sun. at 2:00 p.m. through August 25 at The Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles 90025. There are post-performance discussions July17 and August 9. For info: (310) 477-2055, ext. 2, or on the company website.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Ed Rampell

Ed Rampell is an LA-based film historian and critic, author of "Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the United States," and co-author of "The Hawaii Movie and Television Book." He has written for Variety, Television Quarterly, Cineaste, New Times L.A., and other publications. Rampell lived in Tahiti, Samoa, Hawaii, and Micronesia, reporting on the nuclear-free and independent Pacific and Hawaiian Sovereignty movements.