Photographs by Melanie Grizzel

Joe Mantello and Todd Haimes Crack an Unconventional Classic

A few days before beginning rehearsals for Noël Coward’s Design for Living, Roundabout Artistic Director Todd Haimes and acclaimed director Joe Mantello tell Front & Center why they’re excited about staging an unusual 1932 comedy by a one-of-a-kind playwright.

F&C: How did you choose Design for Living from among Noël Coward’s many comedies?

Haimes: We’ve done a lot of British plays, but believe it or not, Roundabout has never tackled Noël Coward, at least not in the last decade and a half. Two years ago it was Noël Coward’s centenary and we wanted to hold a reading of one of his plays. (We do play readings at Roundabout from time to time to look at things we’re interested in producing, and to give directors and actors a chance to look at plays they’re interested in.)

Initially I think we talked about doing something like Blithe Spirit or Private Lives. But Private Lives had been done a million times, to varying degrees of success, and as a producer this challenged me. So many of the productions of Noël Coward I’ve seen in America have been less than successful. Nobody doubts that he’s a great author. But he has not been very well represented by American productions. Joe is an Associate Artist at the theatre, and he really wanted to do Design for Living, which got me excited about it and led us to do it at the play reading.

Mantello: I knew that it was one of Coward’s major plays (though it was also considered a "problem play" in some ways). When I read it in preparation for the reading I was shocked at how modern it was. I share a lot of the same responses that Todd had to productions of Coward over here; sometimes they try too hard to give it a kind of "style" that makes me feel too removed from the play. Often I find it’s delightful and hilarious but it never feels relevant to my life or the things I think about. But when I first read Design for Living, I realized you don’t have to do it with fancy thirties dressing gowns and so on. It’s modern, it’s complex, and it’s completely relevant.

With this play in particular, the casting of the three main characters really dictates the tone of the production. It lives and dies by how sensational they are and what their chemistry is on stage. We were really lucky to have Alan Cumming on board right from the beginning. And then it was just a question of finding the right people to go with him. When you see Jennifer Ehle, Dominic West and Alan together, there is something sort of contemporary and fresh about the play because of who they are.

Haimes: Alan has always wanted to play this role. It’s so interesting and sort of refreshing: at this point in his career, he could choose to play Hamlet or whatever role he wants. Instead he’s chosen this role, which is very much an ensemble role, and I think it’s sort of a tribute to the kind of actor he is. He knows he can bring something to this part and that he’ll enjoy doing it, and since day one he never wavered, which doesn’t happen so often. It’s been a long road to get these three extraordinary people to come together at the same time.

My guess is that it will be just as entertaining a hundred years from now, no matter what social changes take place, because it’s beautifully constructed.

F&C: Design for Living was mildly scandalous in its time. Is the play’s unusual love triangle still shocking today? What should audiences expect?

Mantello: When I direct something, I don’t intend for everybody to have one reaction to it. Certainly there will be people who will come and find the idea of these three people in a relationship shocking and unconventional. And there will also be people who don’t.

But I think above all Coward wanted to be entertaining and for the audience to have a good time. And that can mean a lot of things. It can mean that you’re shocked. It can mean you’re titillated. It can mean you’re appalled. But I think more than anything, Coward wanted to entertain.

Haimes: As someone who has done a lot of revivals, I’ve given a lot of thought to what makes a great play. This is completely subjective, of course, but I think a great play rarely has anything to do with its shock value; it’s much more whether it says something universal about its themes — in this case, the theme of relationships. So it’s of interest that Coward wrote this kind of play at the time that he wrote it, but I think beyond that it’s an extraordinary, well-written, entertaining play about these unconventional people with a wild relationship. My guess is that it will be just as entertaining a hundred years from now, no matter what social changes take place, because it’s beautifully constructed.

F&C: This is an interesting play to do in the same season as Betrayal. Both touch on themes of fidelity and time (in completely different ways). Is that a coincidence or is it intentional?

Haimes: Actually it’s a remarkable coincidence. There are thematic similarities, but this was not planned.

F&C: The English critic Kenneth Tynan even saw a few similarities between Noël Coward’s dialogue and Harold Pinter’s writing. Is there a serious side to Coward?

Mantello: Oh, definitely. Certainly in this play, the characters are struggling with complicated stuff. I think you do a disservice to Coward as a writer if you just play the sophisticated banter.

Haimes: I’ve always assumed that they were played much more glibly at the time because moral and social standards were different. The underlying issues that Coward was struggling with in his own life (and in Design for Living) couldn’t be presented explicitly on the stage. The way you direct it can have an enormous effect.

It’s a little bit like our production of Cabaret. There were virtually no words changed in that production, but it was staged to be about far more serious things than the original musical comedy version was. Thirty years ago, people didn’t produce musicals on Broadway about things like anti-Semitism. I think it’s somewhat similar with Coward. It’s all there on the page, but when he was first writing he had enough problems. He wasn’t going to hit you over the head with what he was saying in his production.

F&C: Coward himself played Leo, the suddenly successful playwright, in the original production. Is Leo an autobiographical character?

Mantello: Yes, I think he probably is. Particularly since he wrote it for himself. In the second act they talk about success and what it means to be famous: how you get to live by different rules. You’re forgiven a great many things when you’re a celebrity. It can breed a kind of selfishness, which I think is also part of the play. I think that’s the shocking thing about this play; these characters are completely delightful but they’re also completely selfish and self-absorbed.

F&C: What’s the greatest challenge in staging it today?

Mantello: It’s not a plot-driven play. You have to fall in love with these characters and be interested in seeing them pair off in every possible combination—and yet still feel that it’s incomplete until the three of them come together at the end. These three people are truly unable to live life unless they’re together. That includes sex, their emotional lives, everything. That’s complicated and tricky. So that’s where my attention will be as we go into rehearsals.

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