Masters of the Stage

Days before the close of 1986's Tony Award winner for "Best Reproduction of a Play or Musical" Hay Fever, Director Brian Murray sat down with Ada Brown Mather to discuss Mr. Coward's return to Broadway. Murray brings to the conversation a simple, honest and eminently knowledgeable love of Noël Coward's work; a relationship he began as an eleven year old boy reading plays at the library. He speaks about how his direction of Hay Fever on Broadway, starring Rosemary Harris, and how it began with a sense of unfairness that this production of Coward's never got the New York City reception it deserved. Mather and Murray discuss early Coward as an artistic revolutionary whose naturalistic use of language bucked the trend of traditional high comedy. They explore Coward the musician and his incredible talents as a lyricist. Further, Murray tries to explain the delicate landscape of Coward's conversational rhythm and how integral it is to generating a laugh. These two Coward scholars debate which works of Coward should be considered satire, concluding that what defines a Coward comedy isn't its commentary on a single class or group, but the unifying characteristic of laughing at life in general.