Chicago Tribune
NEW YORK — Did somebody cancel the word “farce?”
The new Broadway show by Second Stage is billed as a reconstructed romantic comedy, a feminist tale, they say, of “sex, betrayal and love.” But if you have an elongated joke involving flatulence, folks, and “The Cottage” breaks an epic amount of wind as part of its myriad country-house shenanigans, you’re doing farce.
Farce, farce, farce, farce, farce. Just to be clear.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, especially in the summer.
And if you are in the mood for matchstick penis jokes, more gag props than a Coney Island funhouse and an ensemble of cheerfully over-the-top players contorting body and soul to squeeze every last laugh out of playwright Sandy Rustin’s ridiculous yarn, then director Jason Alexander (”Seinfeld”) just rescued you from the sweaty streets outside and poured some buck’s fizz into your prosaic existence.
Just check with everyone in your group: Some will be tickled pink by “The Cottage” and thrill to the très outré (and highly skilled) comic stylings of Laura Bell Bundy, Eric McCormack, Alex Moffat, Nehal Joshi and Lilli Cooper. Others will be ready to head to the basement bar at intermission to nurse their headache and remain there. This genre is divisive at the best of times and, like everything else in America at the moment, this show doesn’t just double down but throws wads of hopeful cash at the dealer.
In essence, Rustin (known for ”Clue,” the play) has penned an ersatz version of a Noel Coward comedy, as retrofitted for today’s sensibilities.
We’re in an English country house in the late 1920s where there is a whole lot of bonking going on among the middle-aged married set. The plot is like an amalgam of “Hay Fever” and “Private Lives,” except that the two main characters, Sylvia (Bundy) and Beau (McCormack), meet in this house just once a year for hot non-spousal sex. That’s not a new idea, either. Bernard Slade’s 1975 play, “Same Time Next Year,” got there first.
Rustin is no Coward. That writer’s masterworks were subtle, witty affairs, exploratory of public and private selves, throbbing with unbridled passion and embracing of paradox and subverting of moral stricture. They were sexy for sure, but he didn’t need whips or fart jokes, nor could he have gotten them past the censor if he did.
An expedient piece of commercial writing, “The Cottage” reduces all of that to cascading plot complications for comic purposes. The lover’s spouses, played by Moffat and Cooper, make unexpected appearances at the house and a bevy of further romantic entanglements are revealed over the course of two fairly swift acts on Paul Tate DePoo III’s trick-filled setting, their details best not elucidated here for fear of spoiling the surprises.
At times, it’s all a hat on top of a hat, and sometimes a hat on top of a hat on top of a hat, and one of Rustin’s systemic problems here is that the best farces poke fun at power and don’t take otherwise positions on anything. “The Cottage,” by contrast, comes with a message, albeit lightly delivered and, these days, inevitable.
All that said, given the givens, I still had several good laughs. Alexander really has come up with a bushel of sight gags and Bundy, especially, is so far out there that you cannot help but chortle at her character’s antics. Moffat, as fans of “Saturday Night Live” well know, is a formidable physical comedian and all of those gifts are very much on display in this summer soupcon for those who haven’t been able to leave this sticky town behind.
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At the Hayes Theater, 240 W. 44th St., New York; thecottageonbroadway.com.
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