For playwright Sandy Rustin, a beautiful 1920’s English cottage is the perfect setting to plant tulips, daisies and secrets. She is focusing her sense of humor on affairs, extra marital relationships and infidelity and manages to create a charming and hysterical comic farce. Husbands, wives and lovers run amok as partners exchange keys, reveal and confess intimacies, and question their choices in marriage and in cheating. Get your scorecard ready or dance card if you prefer as Hartford Stage, until Sunday, February 8, lets Cupid’s arrows fly hither and yon, striking wherever and whomever they may in “The Cottage.”
Sylvia (Mary Cavett) and Beau (Jordan Sobel), her husband's brother, have been rendezvousing once a year, for seven years, and now she has determined all by herself that they really should have married each other long ago. To that end she has determined to make that happen, without discussing it with Beau, by sending her husband Clarke (Craig Wesley Divino) and Beau’s wife Marjorie (Kate MacCluggage) telegrams confessing that divorces are in their future. Needless to say, the spouses in question, one nine months pregnant arrive at the cottage door.
Not to worry, the second couple are carrying on an affair of their own and Clarke is the father of Marjorie's baby, in case you’re worried. Next in the door is Dierdre (Jetta Juriansz), there to surprise Beau but is the unknown prize package to Sylvia. Last to arrive is Sylvia’s long lost, supposedly dead, teen lover Richard (Matthew J. Harris) who is currently married to Dierdre and has a reputation for murdering all of her illicit suiters. With the twists and turns of the plot, you will have fun matching all the partners as they hop on and off the merry-go-round of beds.
Enjoy playing the games, hide and seek, it, spin the bottle, charades, here comes the bride, dueling with feather dusters as Hunter Kaczorowski’s elegant costumes flit and flounce up and down the stairs of Tim Mackabee’s countryside romantic retreat, with the fine timing of Zoe Golub-Sass’s direction.
For tickets ($20-115), call Hartford Stage, 50 Church Street, Hartford at 860-527-5151 or online at HartfordStage.org. Performance areTuesday to Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m.
No guilt required as you laugh at the antics of these deliciously decadent participants in indecent peccadillos where these entangled sexual games are hysterically afoot.
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