Design for Living

Digging smoothly and relentlessly, the Winthrop House Dramatic Society has examed a play that is more than faintly autobiographical. If you find Noel Coward innocent of the charges for which he was buried i.e., that he was preoccupied with uninteresting and even obnoxious people, and that today he seems as remote from us as, say, General Eisen-hower, you will enjoy the play. Certainly much of last night's audience did.

Coward's boy-girl-boy geometry lesson starts off simply enough, but soon is complicated because it develops that the boys love each other, too. Coward is never gauche and never explicit, but as you can see, this heightens the interest in his study of apparently useless individuals and their diversions. We are diverted from a squalid studio in Paris to a thinly elegant apartment in London to a blatantly elegant one in New York, which proves that Coward knew that useless individuals also could be profitably diverted to the theatre in those three cities, for the purpose of seeing themselves onstage.

But we came not to bury Coward. Thanks to speedy an sometimes very thoughtful direction by Duane Murner, who is also producer, the show moves rapidly and without any awkward pauses at all. This is no small accomplishment because there are some stretches in the script devoid of "wit," and, because the character are so transparent, there is little to hold interest in these long stretches. Quickly coming to mind, for instance, is a drunk scene in the second act, very lengthy indeed, that served only to aggravate the already parched throats of those in the crowd.

Marguerite Tarrant portrays the freelove femme of this item with considerable charm and not much evil, which lends frivolous class to the proceedings. It's a big part played effectively, and she is not the hardest to look at of actresses. James M. Swan deserves credit, too, for a vaguely sensitive approach to his role of a playwright who takes away Miss Tarrant, loses her, then gats her back along with somebody else, Richard Dozier, who had Miss Tarrant, lost her to Swan, took her away again, then got her back along with somebody else, Swan, etc. Dozier, who seems to have had less acting experience than the other two, is loud at times, a bit nervous, but on the whole satisfactory in the part. The other majhor role is taken by Robert Schwartz, a rich and unifluential art dealer who marries Miss tarrant. He has an unfortune muatache and, did space permit, would have the same permit, would hava the same things said about him as were said about Dozier.

Others in the cast include Mikel Lambert, Judith Gilmartin, Walter Leeds, James Gross, Linda Gertsenfeld, Rab Hatfield and Joel Blatt. John Grace designed settings that improve as the play goes on and lighting was arranged by Rudd Canaday.