Outdoors, Coward play is pure Bliss

In "Hay Fever," Debera Lund portrays a retired stage actress who interacts with family members and an assortment of guests - including a diplomat played by Joel Colodner - in her English country home. (COURTESY OF THE PUBLICK THEATRE)

Nothing is more refreshing on a warm summer evening than the crisp comedy of Noel Coward. The Publick Theatre's sleek outdoor production, with the Charles River visible just beyond the stage, creates the perfect contrast between calm countryside and the delightfully dotty Bliss family inhabiting Coward's "Hay Fever."

We meet the Blisses in their country home outside London in the summer of 1925, at the beginning of a weekend in which, unbeknownst to the others, each family member has invited a guest to stay. Judith (Debera Lund), the family matriarch, a recently retired theater actress, has invited a young athlete (Robert Serrell) who has a crush on her. David (Dafydd Rees), a successful novelist and the family patriarch, has invited a flapper named Jackie Coryton (Hannah Wilson) so he can study her for a character in his next book. The Blisses' grown son Simon (Ross MacDonald) has invited the vamp Myra Arundel (Cheryl Turski), and Sorrel Bliss (Lynn Guerra), the 19-year-old daughter, has invited a diplomat (Joel Colodner) who she feels has some experience in the world.

But the guests' expectations of a quiet weekend in the country are dashed the moment they step into the Bliss home. Sorrel describes her family as "slapdash," but this is a quartet that is always thinking, always setting the stage for the next big scene. Although Judith may have retired from the stage, she still acts as if the spotlight is on her, and the most innocent conversation can veer off into an excerpt from one of her starring roles. Her family members easily keep up with her, but for the guests it's a bewildering adventure. A post-dinner game, a peculiar variation on "charades," becomes a hilarious example of the family members' shorthand, their gift for mindlessly petty squabbling, and an impossible challenge for the guests.

The real entertainment comes when each member of the family stalks off after the game with a different guest than the one he or she invited. Innocent kisses exchanged between the new couples are melodramatically interpreted as proposals of marriage, and Judith is given her scene-stealing "fallen woman" display.

The trick to staging "Hay Fever" is to create some sympathy for these shallow, self-absorbed people and to find the joy in the satire of what passes for proper behavior. Director Diego Arciniegas has cast actors who have an easy familiarity with one another and never drift too far into overacting - no mean feat when, as Myra says, everything they do rests "on a featherbed of false emotions."

As Judith, Lund sets the tone for the family, manipulating every moment with the subtlest of gestures and the airiest of expressions. Her underplaying makes Judith's fishing for compliments from her handsome athlete even funnier and the shift into her grand diva mode even more dramatic.

By keeping the scenery-chewing in check, Arciniegas also allows room for everyone to have some fun, from the milquetoast diplomat to the flapper reduced to tears by the Blisses' rude behavior.

Rafael Jaen's costumes seem a bit of a mish-mash of unmatched pieces, which makes them more distracting than they should be. But that's a minor quibble in a production that is so effervescent.