“Design for Living,” which opened Feb. 14, is a raunchy comedy filled with queer love and a risqué throuple presented by Dreamwell Theater at the ArtiFactory.
The script’s subject matter is titillating and salacious, to put it lightly. Playwright Noël Coward beautifully paints the intertwining lives of three people trying to have love and careers.
Although the script is wonderfully written, this element was muddled by the directorial style and the interesting acting choices made by the people on stage.
Viewing this play, it felt like the audience had to stumble through the dull and unexplained lives of characters Coward wrote to be interesting. The lack of dramaturgy in this piece was apparent and prohibited the actors from understanding what they were saying.
There were moments of wonderful hilarity quickly snuffed out by the overcrowded stage. Other moments fell flat because the actors never felt grounded in the piece, as if they weren’t given clear direction.
The production did certain moments very well with the notes of farce written by Coward able to occasionally shine. But with those moments came others where the actors seemed awkward on stage, not remembering their lines or not meshing with the script.
The whole piece came off as something one would watch while attending a high school play they were dragged to. The set was distractingly unprofessional, making it seem like the crew didn’t know how to work with the small stage’s limits.
The set gave off a cozy feel, as though the audience had just stepped into the apartment of a lowly artist. Although the walls were a horrendous shade of pink, the set in act one felt true to form.
But as we traveled through the world of the piece, the apartments and people got more and more wealthy, and the set design seemed to fall more and more flat. The needless scenic transitions to change one wall to make a window bigger seemed redundant and not properly thought through.
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Large pieces of furniture were moved on and off stage, which took up the full intermission times to complete stage transitions. It felt as though when building the set for this play, designers did not consider the space they had to work with and tried to put on a normal proscenium play.
The costumes of the piece were well done. The acquisition of wealth we see in each character as they become more and more successful in their endeavors shows through their clothes and is easily clocked by the audience.
The sound and light design were also effective with the space given. Something to note in transitions between scenes — ones that were not filled with scenic movement — the stage would fall pitch black. This caused the actors to fumble their way around the stage, which was yet again another war flashback from high school theater.
“Design for Living” is a wonderfully written play filled with moments of comedy sure to have you laughing, crying, and in love. Which is why, if you haven’t, you should go and read the play. This production felt poorly directed and was filled with redundancy. The actors’ awkward interactions and the sets were utterly unsatisfying leaving me ultimately let down by this three-hour play.