STAGE REVIEW : A Window on Overprivileged in Old Globe ‘Interior Decoration’

The rich and powerful will always be with us, but their modus vivendi is less and less ours. As voyeurs, we love to know how that 10% lives. As citizens of the world, we’ve pretty much concluded that how they live is overrated. And as members of a theater audience, do we care?

That’s the problem that confronts William Hamilton’s new play, “Interior Decoration,” which opened Sunday at the Old Globe Theatre. It’s a witty comedy in the “Private Lives” mode that has everything to do with the lifestyle of the overprivileged but, in the end, leaves us feeling that we’ve crashed somebody else’s party.

Stylish Sybil Bolton (even the name has a Noel Coward ring) is the powerful CEO of an international steel conglomerate who has decided she wants to have a child without acquiring a husband.

She admits as much to Gerald and Phillipa Detweiler, the interior decorators she has engaged to redo her Fifth Avenue apartment for herself and the new baby. But there’s another reason she brings up the subject: Gerald and “Philly” are friends of millionaire bachelor William Singleton, the man Sybil has selected as the future father of her child. And she needs an introduction.

The Detweilers are astounded, annoyed, compliant, in that order. Their own marriage has been one of convenience. Gerald’s ego is monumental, but his sexual orientation uncertain, and Philly has been gliding by as “Gerald’s wife--and curator.” She secretly has had eyes for the roguish Singleton and doesn’t relish handing him over to Sybil.

But she can be persuaded. Singleton, of course, turns out to be a rascal--a male chauvinist so cocksure of himself that he can’t resist a woman with designs on his progeny--and partakes of Sybil’s scheme for all the wrong reasons.

He quickly discovers that Sybil can give just as good as she gets. It’s a clash of Titans who deserve each other and who, after predictable turns of the screw, get what and whom they deserve.

How deeply you become involved with these beautiful people will depend on your tolerance for cleverly minted one-liners from the Hamilton forge. It’s no accident that Hamilton is a professional cartoonist or that his work is featured in the New Yorker. The zingers come off as WASP-ishly dry as the captions for his cartoons, and provide so much surface firepower that you forget that there is no rear guard. Or not much of one.

“Interior” is slender, old-fashioned, expertly crafted fare that the production at the Old Globe endows with more riches than are to be found under its veneer. Director Jack O’Brien excels at this urbane kind of crisp comedy and has cast it with a crackerjack acting team. Tom Lacy and Deborah Taylor are the voyeuristic meddlers on the sidelines and Deborah May and George Deloy (husband and wife in real life) the sparring couple at the center.

Watching May is watching nature at its best. She is hypnotic: a beauty full of grace, intelligence and warmth as the determined Sybil, and her scenes with William, played with deliberate blinding arrogance by Deloy, have an intimate ring of truth.

Lacy and Taylor thrive on just the reverse. Their characters are defined by a cultivated phoniness that’s become second nature. For Taylor’s Philly, this takes the form of an affection for heavy jewelry, an arch tone and a stooping, questioning stance. Known and loved for his propensity to overdose on shtick, Lacy is rescued by Gerald’s natural addiction to it. There’s no way to overdo, not even when he improvises, as he did Sunday, to pick up a garbled line. He’s simply having the time of his life.

Ralph Funicello has provided three fine sets for the Globe’s revolving stage, including the completed redecoration that features a wall of ghastly pistachio green as evidence of Gerald’s perfectly awful taste. Nice, tongue-in-cheek stuff for which David F. Segal has created sunny lighting and Michael Krass character-defining costumes.

But the production is stronger than the play, which some might call elitist and some stylistically passe . Hamilton writes in the sophisticated tradition of Coward, Oscar Wilde, S. N. Behrman or, closer to our times, A. R. Gurney. But he’s content to go for laugh-bites. The question, despite “Interior’s” timely connection to the Murphy Brown/Dan Quayle brouhaha, is how deep the satire runs, and the answer is not very.

Tom Lacy: Gerald Detweiler

Deborah Taylor: Phillipa Detweiler

Deborah May: Sybil Bolton

George Deloy: William Singleton

Director Jack O’Brien. Playwright William Hamilton. Sets Ralph Funicello. Lights David F. Segal. Costumes Michael Krass. Sound Jeff Ladman. Production stage manager Douglas Pagliotti. Assistant stage manager Maria Carrera.