Production Staff
Director: Molly Burns
Stage Managers:
Charlie Egan, Liz Egan
Costume Designer:
Linda Bremer
Costume Crew:
Karen Babcock, Mary Dempsey,Mary Ellen Druyan, Marcia Grohne,Eileen
Hergenrother-Duban, Janeen Jewell,Mary O'Dowd, Stephanie Rychlowski,
Nancy Schauer, Jane Stacy, Anna Wildermuth
Dramaturg: Terry Kozlowski
Lighting Designers:Benton Bullwinkel, Tom Frohnapfel
Lighting Crew:Nicole D'Asta, Kim Hurley,Mark Perry, Tom Pfeil, Bill Thompson
Makeup Designer:Bridget Kellens Bittman
Makeup Crew:Michaellene Barry, Julie Knoch, Paulette Sarussi
Properties Designers:
Nancy Leone, Bill Love
Properties Crew: Suzanne
Anthoney, Peggy Beyer,
Lori D'Asta, George Dempsey, Karen Holbert, Heinz Karplus,
Carmel Opre,Julie Peterson, Cynthia Petrucci
Set Designer:Margaret Nikoleit
Set Construction Chairs:Mike Huth, Tom Squillo
Set Construction Crew: Jon Allen, Leon Briick, Mike
Bogovich,Joe Delaloye, George Dempsey, Mark Faviano, Bill FitzGerald,
Kirby Harris,
Mark Hewitt,Heinz Karplus, Art Kelly, John Otto,
Paul Roach, Fred Sauers, Gilbert Williams
Set Painting Chairs: Kristin Lampadius, Susan Remy
Set Painting Crew: Tricia Boren, Peggy Carlson,
Jan Frommelt, Pauline Gamble,Debbie McHenry, Laura Michicich,Rob Pold,
Bill Rotz, Sandy Squillo
Sound Designer: Jack Calvert
Sound Crew:Martha Hogenboom, Marilyn Weiher
Production Box Office Chair:
Mary Ellen Schutt
Production Box Office Crew:Peg Callaghan, Susan Cardamone,Ruth Cekal, George
Dempsey,Mary Dempsey, Terry Fanning,Terry Kozlowski, Barbara Lupo,JoAnn
Mallon, Jill Neely, Joan Roeder,Patti Roeder, Mary Smith, Sandy
Squillo,Don Strueber, Carol Suda,Virginia Swinnen, Marilyn Wilson
Production Hospitality Bakers:
Carol Clarke, Kirby Harris,Karen Holbert,
Lisa Machak, Connie Sierzputowski, Megan Wells
Production Hospitality Crew:
John Archer, Linda Bremer,
Brian Centers, Carol Clarke,Mary Clarke, Mary Ellen Druyan,Mike Huth, Pat
Huth,Kathleen Kusper, Caitlin Machak,Lisa Machak, David Michael,Fumiko Kehoe
Michael, Duane Mills, Claire Amy Shunk, Todd Sleezer, Susan Sponder, Megan
Wells
Production House Manager Crew: David Bremer, Joe
Delaloye,George Dempsey, Peter Hilton,Harry Hultgren, Roland Imes,Terry
Locke, Andy Neely,Tom Schutt, Don Strueber
Production Lobby Photo Display: Marjorie Mason Heffernan, Jane Stacy
Production Posters: Kathleen Kusper
Production Program Chair:Carol Dapogny
Production Program Design:John Vilhauer
Production Publicity Chair:Terry Locke
About
the Author:
With more than 60 produced plays
to his credit,
Sir Noel Coward was the acknowledged "master" of the English
stage during
the first half of the 20th Century. This makes him the perfect playwright
to
close our 71st season. While a playwright, actor, singer, composer,
lyricist, novelist, director, film producer, and Vegas cabaret
entertainer,
his greatest creation may have been himself. His languid, polished
urbanity
was a triumph over his obscure starting position as an outsider in English
class society.
He was born December 16, 1899 in a South
London suburb. With little formal education or discipline but the
encouragement of his mother, he became a child actor at the age of 11. His
first play, which he wrote with Esme Wynne, was produced in 1917.His
reputation as a playwright was established by the explosive reaction to
his
serious work, The Vortex (1924). Some of his most famous plays include
Private Lives (1930), Design for Living (1933), Tonight at Eight-Thirty
(1936), Present Laughter (1939), and Blithe Spirit (1941).
According to Clive Fisher's biography, Coward was
a private man, but there were conflicts between his private self and the
public image he worked so carefully to project. He was both a cynic and a
patriot, witty but surprisingly naive at times, a rebel who championed
conformity, the embodiment of sophistication who came from a poor suburb.
Although homosexual, he denied it publicly and created a reputation as a
ladies' man.
He published two volumes of autobiography,
Present Indicative (1937) and Future Indefinite (1954). He was knighted in
1970, lived many of his final years in Jamaica, and died there on March
26,
1973 with his third volume of autobiography, Past Conditional, incomplete.
In 1999, the centennial of his birth, key revivals of
Coward's plays were produced in London and New York, and a gala was held
at
Carnegie Hall.
The Theatre of Western Springs has presiously
produced two of Coward's plays : Nude With Violin (1959) and Blithe Spirit
(1991).
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Director's Note:
When artistic director Tony
Vezner called to tell me that the 71st season would celebrate great
playwrights of the century, we talked of Edward Albee, George Bernard
Shaw, and Tennessee Williams. Later he called to ask if I would be
interested in directing Noel Coward's Hay
Fever-briefly described as a farce with people running in and out of
doors.
Conjuring up visions of long cigarette holders, 20's gowns, martini
glasses, and witty lines, I said "Yes". Then I found a copy of
the play and read Coward's introductory statement: "Hay Fever is far
and away one of the most difficult plays to perform that I have ever
encountered." Gulp. So much for martini glasses.
Yes, Hay Fever is a farce with characters running
in and out of five doorways. But it is also an acute portrayal of an
artistic family-a group of the "talentocracy", as John Lahr
describes them, who become idolized by society despite and maybe because
of their unconventional behavior.
Coward himself was a member of the talentocracy
of the 1920s, so he knew what it was like to entertain (in every sense)
the rest of the world. The Bliss family's weekend guests, all
representative of
traditional society, are comparatively dull. As Richard Greatham, the
visiting diplomat, says, "I never realize how dead I am until I meet
people like you."
Sorel, the Bliss daughter, acknowledges her lack of restraint and explains
that "It's father's and mother's fault really, you see, they're so
vague - they've spent their lives cultivating their arts and
not devoting any time to ordinary conventions and manners and
things."
Ronald Bryden, literary advisor to the Shaw Festival, puts it like this:
"Can a person with artistic values live with people whose values are
silver teapots and tennis?" What happens when these
two worlds meet? That's the play. That is the conflict that sets the
characters hurtling through the doorways.
When Miss Marie Tempest was being directed by Coward in the premiere of
Hay Fever, she asked if he wouldn't please get up and show her how to play
a particular scene, seeing as he wrote it, and he knew how it should be
done. He obliged, and she said "Now I see."
There were many times that I wished Noel Coward could have jumped up on
our stage to show us how to play a scene. In lieu of that, the cast and I
had to rely on our collective sense of theatricality. As intricate and
layered as his writing is, Noel Coward is essentially
"theatrical". He had an innate sense of what is funny and what
is playable. His play construction is nothing short of brilliant. Even
seemingly insignificant lines have layers of meaning and connect to other
lines in the play. My first impression of Coward as "witty"
evolved to
"brilliant" and then to "genius".
I would like to thank my talented cast, led by
three stellar actors who have between them 99 years of active service to
TWS. Thank you to TWS for the opportunity to work on such a splendid play,
to my terrific stage managers, and to the designers who were so excited
about bringing this play to life.
About the Play
According to Noel Coward's autobiography, the seeds
for Hay Fever came from an unusual weekend he spent at the New York home
of Broadway star Laurette Taylor and her family in 1921. He stated,
"On
Sunday evenings we had cold supper and played games, often rather
acrimonious games, owing to Laurette's abrupt disapproval of any guest who
turned out to be self-conscious, nervous, or unable to act an adverb or an
historical personage with proper abandon."
It was inevitable that someone should eventually capature this
eccentricity in a play, and Coward was publicly grateful that no guest
thought of writing Hay Fever before he did. Laurette Taylor denied
any resemblance to her family upon seeing the show with the comment
"None of us is ever unintentionally rude."
Coward wrote Hay Fever in three days when
he was only 24 years old. It opened in 1925 and played for a year to good
houses. It was called "the gayest, brightest and most amusing
entertainment
in London." On its Broadway opening, Brooks Atkinson
wrote,"After seeing Hay
Fever you will never give week-ends again nor accept week-end engagements,
but you will go to the theatre forever and ever. Amen."
Note
from the Dramaturg
Hay Fever: Comedic Turning Point
by Terry Kozlowski
Hay Fever is significant as a turning point in Noel
Coward's career as a writer of comedies. In his biography, Present
Indicative, he says, "When I had finished (Hay Fever) and had it
neatly typed and bound up, I read it through and was rather unimpressed
with it. This was an odd sensation for me, as in those days I was almost
always enchanted with everything I wrote. I knew certain scenes were
good...but apart from these it seemed to me a little tedious. I think that
the reason for this was that I was passing through a transition stage as a
writer; my dialogue was becoming more natural and less elaborate, and I
was beginning to concentrate more on the comedy values of the situation
rather than the comedy values of actual lines. I expect that when I read
through Hay Fever that first time, I was subconsciously bemoaning its lack
of snappy
epigrams."
For the first time, though it was later seen as typical of a Coward
comedy, Hay Fever used a new kind of dialogue. Rather than the witty
epigrams of an Oscar Wilde or the natural wit of Coward's public
pronouncements, the dialogue in Hay Fever is spare, clean and modern. It
relies on very ordinary lines, sometimes as simple as "no there
isn't, is there?" to make its comedic impact. It requires context.
Hay Fever takes place during an English country
house weekend, the standard setting for the conventional "drawing
room" comedies of English theatre. But there is nothing conventional
about this
house or this weekend. Coward creates a new comedic world. W. Somerset
Maugham refers to Coward's "spoken hieroglyphs" where
"dialogue is eked out with shrugs, waves of the hand and
grimaces." Coward's theatrical shorthand focuses on "the surface
of life" as John Lahr describes it.
Stagebill notes that "Coward realized that the chit-chat and small
talk of 20th-century life actually obscures deeper passions and
anxieties." Long before "subtext" (what a character doesn't
say) became dominant in 20th-century theatre, Coward's terse, clipped
dialogue pulled audiences to pay attention to the unspoken emotional
currents on stage.
Eventually, Noel Coward recognized the true
accomplishments of Hay Fever. In 1934 he wrote, "Hay Fever is
considered by many to be my best comedy....From a professional standpoint,
Hay Fever is far and away one of the most difficult plays to perform that
I have ever encountered. To begin with, it has no plot at all, and
remarkably little action. Its general effectiveness therefore depends upon
expert technique from each and every member of the cast....I am very much
attached to Hay Fever. I enjoyed writing it and producing it, and I have
frequently enjoyed
watching it."
So, as even Noel Coward himself recognized,
Hay Fever brought us a master's understanding of how people communicate
themselves in many ways besides words. The playwright's "acute sense
of the moment" and human nature was a great gift to the theatre, one
we still appreciate.
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