“The Cottage,” brightening the winter doldrums through Feb. 8 at Hartford Stage, is a faux 1920s British comedy written a few years ago by an American playwright, Sandy Rustin. It’s essentially a parody of the “comedy of manners” genre based in which exaggerated levels of social decorum are greatly upset due to some gross breaches of etiquette. These tend to involve love affairs or status issues or shock revelations and result in dismayed reactions and abrupt comeuppances for previously unflappable characters.
Rustin is a prolific playwright whose musical adaptation of the Connecticut-set film “Mystic Pizza” (which uses 1980s pop songs as its score) was done at the Ivoryton Playhouse in 2024, and whose non-musical adaptation of the movie “Clue” toured to both the Shubert Theatre in New Haven and the Waterbury Palace last year. Rustin is also an actor, who played Sandy in a national tour of “Grease” that came to the Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford in 1999 and has performed regularly in the “Gravid Water” improv theater series at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City.
“The Cottage” is not a parody of any specific play or style. It simultaneously mocks the delicately witty comedies of Noel Coward, 1970s farces such as “No Sex Please, We’re British,” the sort of cosy whodunnits concocted by Agatha Christie and even some American relationship comedies like “Same Time Next Year” or “Rumors.” It is rife with social stereotypes but begins upending them almost immediately, offering endless surprises. The first one is when Sylvia, played by Mary Cavett as a sort of sheltered, pampered free spirit, is seen luxuriating with her romantic partner Beau, played by Jordan Sobel, in the drawing room of the play’s titular countryside cottage. It’s easy for the audience to assume that Sylvia and Beau are married, but we learn that this is actually an affair, with the trysts happening infrequently. To say anything else, or even some of what was just said, would be to get into spoiler alert territory.
Jetta Juriansz and Jordan Sobel on the stairs and Kate MacCluggage on the couch in Sandy Rustin’s farce “The Cottage” at Hartford Stage. (T Charles Erickson)
It seems like a huge revelation happens every 30 seconds in this show, and that is much of the fun of “The Cottage.” There are seven characters in the play but at least seven different romantic couplings, most of them conducted with proper British attitudes and stiff upper lips.
None of the actors are actually British but realism is far from the point here. These characters are putting on airs or have hidden pasts or otherwise aren’t always being their true selves. Beyond that, “The Cottage” only pretends to be a mannered drawing room comedy. It’s really a wild slapstick panic in which these well-bred cottage-dwellers are constantly slipping, tripping, getting drunk and indecorously farting. There’s an elaborate three-way “spit take” and some impressive comical acrobats around a staircase.
The lead role of Sylvia, who spends much of the first act in a nightgown that everyone else onstage makes a point of complimenting, is played by Cavett, an accomplished New York actor who also happens to have been a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall and thus can not only engage in witty repartee but kick up her heels elegantly when she puts a record on the Victrola. As her lover Beau, Sobel gets to be both classy and cloddish. As Beau’s brother Clarke, who has his own deep relationship to Sylvia, Craig Wesley finds his own lane of male boorishness so that he and Sobel aren’t doing the same shtick. A couple of unexpected visitors to the cottage, Deirdre (Jetta Juriansz from “Drood” at the Goodspeed Opera House last year) and Richard (Matthew J. Harris, who’s got a lot of Shakespeare on his resume and sure knows how to make a dramatic entrance) stir up fresh excitement before the plot gets a chance to flag.
The cast of “The Cottage” at Hartford Stage. The expansive British country house scenic design is byTim Mackabee. (T Charles Erickson)
For longtime Hartford Stage subscribers, the big excitement in “The Cottage” cast is Kate MacCluggage, seen as she’s never been seen before on that stage. MacCluggage has appeared at Hartford Stage before as the crafty modern Greenwich Village witch in “Bell, Book and Candle,” as Viola in “Twelfth Night,” as Lady MacDuff and one of the witches in “Macbeth” and Hermianne in “La Dispute.” Here, she’s an extremely pregnant woman named Marjorie who shatters her own prim demeanor by giving in to some outrageous bodily functions.
“The Cottage” operates on a chaotically high comic level for two hours (with an intermission). That it kicks so hard for so long is not just a credit to director Zoë Golub-Sass, who maintained a similar fast loud pace for “Hurricane Diane” at Hartford Stage last year, but to scenic designer Tim Mackabee, costume designer Hunter Kaczorowski, lighting designer Evan C. Anderson and sound designers Nathan A. Roberts and Charles Coes, who provide a suitably colorful and cartoonish atmosphere for the play’s amped-up antics. Mackabee’s set isn’t just packed with cute distractions, from overstuffed bookcases to a taxidermied fox, it is as full of surprises as Rustin’s script.
‘The Cottage’ promises to be a rare mix of comedy and romance at Hartford Stage
As a contemporary writer, Rustin is exceptional at keeping the action flowing and the comic energy high. She lampoons dry, leisurely British plays by making “The Cottage” fast, loose and supremely silly. Yet that’s not the coolest thing about this ingeniously ridiculous play. It turns out that “The Cottage” is actually about something. When it makes fun of British stereotypes of alluring married women, naive fiancees, jealous husbands and domineering spouses, the play is also proclaiming that it’s simply wrong to brand women as weak and vulnerable, and reprehensible for men to treat them as playthings or less than equals in relationships. When the smoke clears at the end of “The Cottage” a message has been imparted.
“The Cottage” by Sandy Rustin, directed by Zoë Golub-Sass, runs though Feb. 8 at Hartford Stage, 50 Church St., Hartford. Performances are Tuesdays through Fridays at 7:30 p.m., Saturdays at 2 and 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. There is an added 2 p.m. matinee on Feb. 4. $20-$105. hartfordstage.org/.
