Old Creamery Airs its Private Lives

By K Michael Moore

Amana - What is it that drives us to that one person who has the singular power to make us the most crazy, frustrated, and darkest person we can be? I mean that one person who can turn us into a monstrous version of ourselves, tempt us to rage or childishness with the simplest of words – but also turns on some pilot light deep inside us, igniting not only those frightening fires but also simultaneously heating and creating the entire world for us. I am certainly generalizing here; please forgive me. But I know very few people who don’t have “that” someone, lurking like a specter of both love and fury, somewhere in their lives. Maybe they married them. Maybe they divorced them. Maybe they had a torrid affair with them in college and ran like hell, never looking back. For some, that person pops in and out of their lives, simultaneously tossing everything into chaos and bringing back an element of passion and joy that had gone away in their absence.

Old Creamery’s current production of Noel Coward's Private Lives explores the idea of that someone - not with a scalpel but with a typically Coward-esque battering ram. The show is a flippant, indirect series of jabs that keeps the audience cringing and laughing throughout.

The story shows us the roller coaster relationship of Amanda (Saffron Henke) and Elyot (Jim Van Valen), who divorced five years ago after a brutally and mutually aggressive marriage. By chance, both arrive to the same hotel, on the same day, to celebrate their respective honeymoons with their respective new spouses – Sybil (Laura Ernst) and Victor (Eric Hedlund). In the way only theatre can require, they of course happen to be in rooms adjoined by a shared balcony.