Characterization drives the humor in City Lit’s Hay Fever
City Lit’s Artistic Director, Terry McCabe, next directorial credit is full of laughter, the heartless kind. Unlikable characters drive the humor, not jokes in Noel Coward’s Hay Fever. We spoke with McCabe about Coward’s writing, why audiences love to hate these characters, and what’s next for City Lit. Hay Fever runs until Oct. 9 at City Lit.
Q. Hay Fever seems like one of those classic feel good comedies despite being described as heartless. What about this play pulled you in?
A. I never try to analyze why I like a play, so I'm not sure how good an answer I can give to this. I think maybe people who have a long-ago memory of the play may think of it as a feel-good comedy, because it is certainly very funny. But the play makes no attempt to get the audience to like the characters; we laugh at them rather than with them.
Q. With this play being almost 100 years old, what elements make this piece timeless?
A. In a broad conceptual way—but in no specific detailed way—Hay Fever is kind of like Seinfeld, in that the four central characters are fundamentally unlikeable, and so encased in their bubble together that they are oblivious to the world around them. This consistently causes them to behave badly when dealing with the rest of the world, and that's funny.
Q. Since City Lit focuses on the literary side. Do you have a favorite line from the play?
A. The thing I like about the writing is that he doesn't try to write jokes; the humor comes from specific characters being in specific situations and taking specific actions. We tend to think of Noel Coward as being loosely in the same school of playwriting as Oscar Wilde: brilliantly constructed epigrams that would be funny in any context, like when one Wilde character tells another, "I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train." But Coward doesn't write that way at all. We laugh at Wilde's characters because they say funny things; we laugh at what Coward's characters say because the characters are funny independently of any given line they speak. One of the big laugh lines in Hay Fever is "Hello. Did you have a nice journey?" Another is "You haven't played it at all yet." It's great comic writing partly because it's harder than writing jokes.
Q. The Mark of Kane is next for City Lit, a much darker piece. Why should audiences come for some laughs with Noel Cowards' Hay Fever before embarking into the world of comics?
A. There are plenty of laughs in The Mark of Kane, but you're right that it's not a comedy per se. It's the first installment of a trilogy of plays being written for City Lit by Chicago playwright Mark Pracht that explore certain milestone events in the early decades of the comic book industry. The Mark of Kane is about the creation of Batman in 1939, at a time when the industry was a shadowland of semi-plagiarism occasionally illuminated by brilliant inspiration. Two guys spent a weekend hurriedly slapping together a new superhero so they could land a gig doing a six-page story in Detective Comics, consciously lifting various details from the Phantom, Zorro, the Shadow, and a now-forgotten Mary Roberts Rinehart villain called The Bat. Their creation made one of them a millionaire, while the other died broke. The Mark of Kane is about all this and more, and it's a terrific play. So is Hay Fever, and people should come see both if both seem interesting to them.
