TWO VIEWS OF DESIGN FOR LIVING

James Kirchick's:

Noel Coward's "Design for Living" — now in revival by the Shakespeare Theatre Company — shocked audiences when it premiered on Broadway in 1933. It's not hard to see why.

The play, about a polyandrous relationship between two men and a woman, makes no apologies for its liberationist view of sex and relationships and could hardly be more direct in its sympathetic presentation of gay attachment. "Design for Living" was considered so risque that Coward had to wait until 1939 before staging a production in London for fear of offending British censors.

Seen today, the play shocks, but for an altogether different reason: Its message is so outdated that it's bewildering why any theater would put it on except for its curatorial interest as a period artifact. ...

"Design for Living" premiered in an era when traditional ideas about sex and the role of women in society were being challenged, and the play's notoriety almost surely had something to do with the audience's vicarious envy of the characters' ability to break free of oppressive conventions. In the ensuing 70-plus years, however, America has witnessed the wages of free love, and we've decided they're not pretty. The play's controversy is obsolete; there really is no serious constituency these days arguing for the virtue of non-monogamous relationships. And as much as gays have been cultural iconoclasts, it's difficult to imagine a leading gay playwright of Coward's artistic stature today endorsing the sort of message presented in "Design for Living."

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and mine:

...The D.C. audience seemed to go along with the paeans to honesty and unconventional love for a very long time. Although if you're less committed to total honesty than these characters you may find their impassioned revelations self-centered and cruel, they are drawing on a powerful philosophy which commentator James Poulos has dubbed Eros lo volt! -- romantic love is its own justification.

Coward in some ways stacks the deck in favor of the lovers: Gretchen comments defensively that at least they aren't out "peppering the world with illegitimate children," and in fact none of the main characters have families or a history which precedes their meeting. Their bodies' only vulnerability is in sexual desire; no aging, no pregnancy, no illness. ...

There's something unfinished about Design for Living, some sense that we're still seeing the plot synopsis rather than the full interplay of characters. Perhaps some of the missing aspects become clearer when Coward's play is compared to its recent descendant, Edward Albee's 2002 The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?: Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy. Albee name-checks Coward in both the stage directions and dialogue, but recasts Design for Living's story as ambiguously-reactionary tragedy rather than ambivalently-liberal comedy. Albee marshals the same ideas of the unstoppable, unimaginable, irresistible power of erotic love… and puts them in the mouth of a man besotted with a nanny goat.

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Labels: culture, gay marriage, Marriage, polyamory, sex

posted by Eve at 4:31 PM VOTE

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