O.C. THEATER / JAN HERMAN : ‘Hay Fever’s’ Dramatic Cure

As stagehands hammered away blissfully, putting the finishing touches to the English country mansion that frames the action for Noel Coward’s “Hay Fever,” director William Ludel regarded the set from the back of the Costa Mesa theater like a kid marveling at a fabulous toy.

“That man can do anything,” he said, nodding at the slight figure of South Coast Repertory’s resident set designer Cliff Faulkner tinkering quietly with a scenic prop amid the racket.

“What’s really amazing is he does it so easily. No fuss. No ego. Would you believe he just got off a plane from Paris? He probably hasn’t even slept,” Ludel said.

Having Faulkner around on the day the cast would be trying out the set in rehearsal for the first time last week made eminent sense for obvious practical reasons. But his presence also seemed an especially good omen to the 44-year-old director. When Ludel made his debut at SCR in September with the season-opening hit revival of “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” it was also designed by Faulkner.

This is not to say Coward’s 1925 comedy, which premieres tonight on the SCR Mainstage, has anything in common with the 1939 classic by George Kaufman and Moss Hart--unless, of course, it is longevity and laughter.

“They aren’t comparable at all,” Ludel said. “Kaufman and Hart wrote a New York Jewish Broadway show, and it’s brilliant that way. Coward is an ocean apart. ‘Hay Fever’ is much more about style and manners, or the lack thereof. The difference between them is like the difference between America and England.”

Coward, who had one of the most illustrious careers in the English theater as a performer, playwright and composer, said it took him three days to write “Hay Fever.”

Given his prolific output, there is no reason to doubt him. Before he died in 1973 at the age of 73, he penned 42 plays, revues and operettas, two autobiographical memoirs and a handful of movie and television scripts.

Moreover, Coward made no pretense to writing for the ages. He produced what even in its own day was regarded as sublime fluff. Accordingly, the epitaph on his memorial tablet in Westminster Abbey--”a talent to amuse”--echoes his own self-deprecating lines from a song in “Bitter-Sweet”: “I believe / That since my life began / The most I’ve had is just / A talent to amuse.”

Or as he elaborated in a newspaper interview at the height of his success on Broadway in 1931:

“So far as I am concerned, posterity isn’t of any frightful significance; I think if it were I’d become self-conscious and wouldn’t be able to work at all. I could no more sit down and say ‘Now I’ll write an Immortal Drama’ than I could fly, and anyway I don’t want to. I have no great or beautiful thoughts. More than anything else I hate this pretentious, highbrow approach to things dramatic. The primary and dominant function of the theater is to amuse people, not to reform or edify them.”

That view is the precise opposite of the prevailing belief at SCR, where theater tends to be exalted as a temple of ideas and the new plays developed there as often as not turn out to be dramatized abstractions. (Witness the recently closed “Great Day in the Morning” by Thomas Babe, an indulgence in 1890s period kitsch that masqueraded as the thinking-man’s barometer of contemporary social values.)

“Hay Fever” avoids such intellectual fictions. If it is about anything, “it’s about gravity versus high spirits, serious versus bubbles, proper versus outrageous,” said Ludel, a New York native. “You’ve got the literal people versus the creative people. It’s about the civilians who don’t get it versus the artists who do. And ultimately, it’s about being who you are. You can’t make yourself into something or someone you’re not.”

The plot of Coward’s comedy revolves around a summer weekend at the plush but disheveled home of Judith and David Bliss and their post-adolescent children, Sorel and Simon. They are a family of high-class bohemians, each of whom has carelessly invited a guest down from London without telling the others or alerting the put-upon housekeeper.

Judith, a glamorous West End star recently retired from the stage but already thinking of a comeback, has a manly young admirer coming to stay; David, a successful writer of so-called women’s novels, has invited a dizzy flapper; their son, Simon, a budding artist inclined to draw nudes and clever caricatures, is expecting a vamp of a certain age whose reputation precedes her; and their daughter, Sorel, vibrant and eager for experience, has invited a suave globe-trotting diplomat.

All the guests have been promised the same room, needless to say. But that inconvenience is minor compared with the blithe chaos of the household in general and the changing liaisons among hosts and guests in particular.

Coward said he got his idea for “Hay Fever” from the Sunday evenings he spent with the actress Laurette Taylor and her family at their home on Riverside Drive during his first trip to New York in 1921.

Taylor, best remembered for her last appearance on Broadway as Amanda Wingfield in “A Glass Menagerie,” was one of the great stage stars of her generation. She also was a great beauty in her youth, which went all the way back to vaudeville.

Unlike her prissy husband, the playwright Hartley Manners, Taylor was “frequently blunt to the point of embarrassment,” Coward recalled. “She was naive, intolerant, lovable and entirely devoid of tact.”

Taylor and Manners and their two children often played charades for amusement. But, Coward noted, they were “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.”

Just that sort of game opens the second act of “Hay Fever.” And while the group portrait of Judith Bliss and her family is not a literal rendering of Laurette Taylor and hers, it is worth noting that Coward first called the play “Still Life” (later changed to “Oranges and Lemons” before “Hay Fever” finally stuck).

Aptly described by Coward biographer Sheridan Morley as “a comedy of bad manners,” it would seem to be an easy play to do. The brittle wit of the dialogue jumps off the page, for example.

But there isn’t much more to the plot than the setting, and the comic tone can turn arch in the wrong hands. Coward himself always said it was harder to stage than it looked.

“It’s a tricky play,” Ludel acknowledged. “And that’s because the style is difficult to find. Amateurs who try it think: one set, nine people, no big deal. They don’t have a chance.

“What’s hard is getting the reality of the characters so that the Bliss family doesn’t become cartoonish. You have to believe the details of their lives matter enough to keep your attention. You also don’t want them to become such tiresome people that you’d like to escape.”

The secret to success is in the casting, of course. Ludel knows this as well as anyone.

“We hope to make it a laugh riot, and Kandis is in it,” he said, referring to Kandis Chappell as though she were an ace up his sleeve.

Indeed, Chappell, who stars as Judith Bliss, has won two Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle awards for previous roles at SCR. And she is coming off a brilliant comic performance in yet another British revival, Alan Ayckbourn’s “Intimate Exchanges,” mounted earlier this season on the SCR Second Stage (where it set a box-office record).

For that matter, Ludel seems to have aces in all his pockets. The top-notch cast includes:

* SCR newcomer Melanie van Betten, who lit up the stage last summer at Shakespeare Orange County; and the versatile SCR veteran Karen Hensel, whose comic stock-in-trade will be put on display in one of her inimitable character roles;

- Jane Macfie, Timothy Landfield, James Cromwell and David Whalen, all with Broadway credits and all making their SCR debuts;

* Benjamin Livingston, who came to SCR from GroveShakespeare earlier this season for “The Man Who Came to Dinner” and settled in with “Our Country’s Good,” and Marnie Mosiman, last seen at SCR two seasons ago as Ann Whitfield in an unforgettable “Man and Superman.”

Reflecting on both the players and the play, Ludel seemed very pleased.

“I think of this show as a weekend in the country,” he said. “Everything gets sexed up and turned around, and anything can happen.”

* “Hay Fever” opens today and continues through May 16 at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Performances Tuesdays to Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Sundays at 7:30 p.m.; Matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. $25 to $34. (714) 957-4033.