The new Broadway comedy “The Cottage” begins with a couple of lovers in an English country house in 1923, the morning after their annual illicit meeting. Sylvia, played by “Legally Blonde” star Laura Bell Bundy, burns with passion for her lover, Beau, played by Eric McCormack from “Will & Grace.”
One mid-June afternoon, the cast wore street clothes as they stumbled through the show at a rehearsal studio in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen. When Beau, in a fit of desire, sank his teeth into Sylvia’s foot, McCormack basically playfully bit into Bundy’s sneaker top.
Ah, the glamor of acting!
However, the piece itself has a certain borrowed elegance. Arguably a farce – though the playwright, Sandy Rustin, rejects that term, suggesting that for her stock characters and clowning – “The Cottage” is a feminist twist on witty British comedies in the mold of Noël Coward.
“I’m a really big fan of that whole genre of British upper-crust style,” said Rustin, whose best-known play is the murder-mystery-comedy “Clue,” an adaptation of the 1985 film. to be desired. They are often just there to serve the men. I was interested in finding a way into that genre where the women ruled.
It’s no coincidence that Rustin, an actor who learned sketching and improvisation with the Upright Citizens Brigade, set “The Cottage” in the 1920s, when British women’s rights were gaining ground. But feminism is more insinuated than overt for much of the play.
Only gradually does it become clear that Sylvia, Bundy’s character, is the heroine of this ensemble piece, which premieres July 7 at the Helen Hayes Theater. Sylvia cheats on Beau and is married to Clarke, who in turn has an affair with Marjorie, Beau’s wife. All of them, along with a few other lovers, turn up in what Act II says is a very busy cottage.
The six-member cast includes Lilli Cooper – a Tony Award nominee for “Tootsie,” who last appeared on Broadway last year in the feminist farce “POTUS” – as the heavily pregnant Marjorie. Late in “Saturday Night Live,” Alex Moffat plays Clarke, a role that taps into Moffat’s talent for falling down stairs. Jason Alexander, of “Seinfeld” fame, directs.
‘Comedy is hard,’ Alexander said, though he was exuberant during rehearsal and watched from behind his desk. “To make something light is to lift heavy.”
In the days following the stumble, he, Rustin, and some of the actors spoke individually by phone about what it takes to pull off this period-style nouveau throwback play. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.
It’s all about precision, baby.
SANDY RESTIN Every actor walks on stage like they’re in a legitimate Noël Coward play, they’re in an Oscar Wilde play. And then things get a little out of hand. That reality is more or less unraveling.
LAURA BELL BUNDY I’m at about 140 of 147 pages [of the script]. And let me tell you, these words, they are not common in my native language. I swear that’s been the hardest part of remembering where all the “darlings” and “darlings” go. If you don’t understand the exact wording, it’s like that’s not the style. And you also have to pronounce it so fast, because that’s the rhythm.
“Tempo becomes a character.”
ERIC McCORMACK As Jason has said many times, these are all great words, but without the pace, without the absolute synergy of the six of us, they just sit there. This becomes its own thing when the six of us are firing on all cylinders and the pace virtually becomes a character. The urgency of the play isn’t just the “Oh my God, someone’s coming to the door” danger, as much as it is, we’re all running for our lives. We dance for our lives.
BUNDY Comedy has a rhythm, especially stage comedy. The comedy is in the way some of those lines are delivered, the pace they’re at, the volume they’re at. That’s essentially the same as musical theatre, or the same as multi-camera comedy. That’s why I think Eric is nailing this. That’s also why Jason does this well.
The play is like a musical. Or Whac-a-Mole.
JASON ALEXANDER I call it the kind of non-musical musical. With a musical number, everyone in it, even if they’re wildly separated from each other, they all understand the tempo, the intonation, the mood of the piece, the movement of the piece. This piece and this cast demand that in a similar way, but there’s no one holding a drum beat and there’s no one playing a melody. So they must feel it internally with each other.
LILLI COOPER We are all cogs in this wheel. And sometimes there are six of us on stage. But you know, the focus has to be on something very specific. So we need to learn how to blend into the landscape in moments and jump forward in moments. During rehearsal the other day I compared this piece to a Whac-a-Mole. We need to figure out which mole, and when, to jump out of the hole.
The script is a kind of score.
BUNDY Recently when I lost my voice it was hard for me to convey all the tonality that when you change the tone of voice can hit a punchline. Whatever the format, whether it’s a musical theater comedy or has no music in it, it still has music in it.
McCORMACK This roll is literally a three octave roll. You need all those notes just to surf the wave of that very stilted English conversation.
Poses are borrowed from the past.
ALEXANDER Can we find a common language of behavior and action and movement and playstyle that is clearly rooted in what we now consider the over-the-top acting styles of the ’30s and ’40s? There’s a kind of pose there that’s just behaviorally different. I said to Eric once or twice, “Eric, that arm gesture you just made is all 2023.”
BUNDY The body language of [Sylvia] being this fairly well-to-do woman from 1920s Britain: how does that body hold itself? That’s what I’m looking into. Then when she starts to transform and become a more authentic version of herself that isn’t wrapped up in the finer points of time and what a woman should be, how a woman should act, how does the body language change? Those are all things I really need to be prepared for.
Bodies are comic fodder.
RUSTIN I tend to write very physical comedies, with equal parts text and what happens to the bodies on stage. The two things for me are married. The humor comes from how these people inhabit their space.
COOPER I was pregnant quite recently, a year and a half ago. It’s so crazy how you say that [costume pregnancy] belly up really brings me back. It’s like this sense memory. When I was pregnant I couldn’t believe it; it’s pretty wild that we let people grow into ourselves. So there is an absurdist element to it. There is humor in spatial awareness. Like, I take up more space physically when I have this belly.
Pies, no. Stairs, yes.
McCORMACK Besides just being a hundred years old and not really wanting to fall down the stairs anymore – I’ll leave that to Alex – the hardest thing about physical comedy is usually doing something that feels in the moment. We’ve all seen pies in the face and all that sort of thing. But finding an original moment, especially in a moment of great fear or great fear, is just a great reward.
ALEX MOFFAT I am interested to enter the theater and see what the stairs look like. Currently in our [rehearsal] space, it’s just a few flights of stairs. I can [fall down them] six or seven times a day, as we’ve always done. But when it’s like 12 flights of stairs coming down from the top floor of the cottage, we’ve got a lot to figure out.
The political message? Sneak in.
BUNDY I was very drawn to this piece because of this revelation from this woman [Sylvia] begins to have – that her joy need not revolve around a man’s love. Women’s sexuality is so stigmatized. And the thing is, these truths about what it means to be a sex drive woman makes us laugh too.
MOFFAT Hopefully it’s just a roaring freight train of laughter. But it could definitely surprise people with the fact that the piece has such a great, strong, feminist point of view. Just doing something really funny and taking people along for that ride, it can work as long as people get sucked into the comedy of it, into the story of it. And maybe at the end they say, “Oh! That made an interesting point.”
COOPER One of my favorite lines on the show is [paraphrasing], “Well, maybe she doesn’t need a man.” It’s such a revelation to these people that they really think about it. That concept so inscrutable to this generation is funny in itself. And feminist.
