American Players Theatre's Hay Fever as bizarro Oscar Wilde

The program for American Players Theatre's production of Hay Fever (which runs through Oct. 3) contains a typically playful, modest, and yet somewhat misleading quote from Nöel Coward about his play: “It was noted that the play had no plot and that there were few if any witty lines. This I think and hope is quite true.” There are plenty of witty lines in Hay Fever, most of which skew surprisingly blue for a play from the 1920s. Winking speculations—for example, why a woman would prefer a clean-shaven man—and even more transparent allusions to, say, getting one’s pole stuck while “punting,” are scattered throughout. The admittedly simplistic plot and now seemingly prescient reliance on discomfort for laughs highlight the reasons Coward was distanced from Oscar Wilde’s comedies of manners, but Hay Fever reveals some unexpected common ground between these two playwrights.

Like Wilde’s works, Hay Fever revolves around an aristocratic family, the Blisses. But unlike Wilde’s old-money subjects, the Bliss’ have earned their landed-gentry status through artistic ingenuity. Judith, the mother (in a standout performance by Tracy Michelle Arnold), was a famed actress; David, her husband, is a respected and popular author; and their two grown children don’t really do much of anything. All of them have affairs with partners of inappropriate ages and statuses, and relish reading of their exploits in the gossip rags.

The play revolves around all four secretly asking prospective partners to stay in the same room for the weekend. As the overcrowded situation unfolds, the family members trade various partners and interrupt scenes with yoga positions or meditative chants of “Ohm” (an aptly modernizing addition to the text by APT), and of course act rudely toward one another and the guests. Their barbed, quipped exchanges could keep up with any number of Wilde's wits, yet tend more toward bluntness than florid wordplay: "Love's a very big word, Simon." "It isn't—it's tiny."

The Bliss’ out-there behavior and extremely open, almost free-love sexual mores are the key differences between Coward and Wilde, as is how the play ends. Where Wilde would have thrown in engagements and happy resolutions, the protagonists (if you could call them that) of Hay Fever proclaim false engagements and are rightfully deserted by their wronged lovers. Not that the Bliss family notices the next morning. They’re theatrical beings completely detached from all but one another, happy to live in their own overwrought little world. Coward’s vapid aristocrats are, like the author, out to shock audiences—that is, when they aren’t engaging in bouts of silence or mundane conversation played for laughs. It all feels like a more vulgar Wilde: more isolated, shocking, and intentionally uncomfortable.