Noel Coward's "The Vortex": A Modernized, But No Less Vertiginous, Tale of Vanity, Family and Manners

I will see The Vortex again. That's my strongest possible endorsement of a play, which, unlike a movie, isn't the price of a glass of wine at an upscale bar or restaurant. The acting is exquisite all around, but Shannon Holt (Florence Lancaster) took my breath away throughout. The 1924 Noel Coward play, his first hit, has been transported some four decades to 1965. 

Modernization is risky business and it succeeds wildly here, in no small part due to Brian Primeux's dazzling costume design. One might say the freewheeling 1920s, the decade between the devastating Great War and WWII (or at least the ominous and terrifying events leading up to 1939) maps well onto the 1960s, with boundaries and strictures of all kinds rapidly dissolving. Artists in my mother's parents' generation smoked marijuana in the 1920s, a decade not as plagued by the puritanical mores of the 1950s against which the 1960s and 1970s were almost a predictable response.  

Perhaps the class context of The Vortex facilitates the temporal shift. I am by no means committed to this theory, but one might argue that the values and experiences of the leisure class (the worlds of Henry James or Edith Wharton) change less from generation to generation than those of the middle and lower classes. 

The language of Florence Lancaster and her friends is distinctively British and buttoned-down, with flourishes of Oscar Wilde, but their social life--which is divided between homes in London and the country--is not unlike the two-residence lifestyle of Brits with money, stretching at least as far back as the Victorians and still present today. The characters even speak of making their trains: we could be on the Upper East Side discussing Saturday morning trains on Metro North's Hudson line to Dutchess County. 

It's no different, really, in the London of America: New York. As a New Yorker, you have "arrived" when you can afford a place both in the city and "the country," whether this is upstate, the Hamptons or even the Cape. (But don't say Boston: New Yorkers who summer on the Cape don't consider the Cape to be Boston, and they certainly don't want to be told they spend summers in city of the Red Sox , Patriots and Bruins.) 

Act I is riotously funny. Coward's language glitters like the diamonds worn by Florence Lancaster. Holt, an extraordinarily beautiful woman, was born to play the role of Florence, the pathologically vain, self-deluded aging beauty in a dead marriage partly her fault, whose hold over a fawning handsome lover half her age is quickly unraveling. 
The play is not a single vortex as the title might suggest. Florence's story is one vortex unsettlingly fused with that of her son's, who initially seems fine (if exhausted after a year of Parisian debauchery), but turns out to have a drug problem. 
I was a few minutes late. (The turn-off is hard to see at night so if you've never been to the venue, leave extra time in case you miss it as there is no left turn for awhile and no left turn over the double lines into the tiny driveway.) When I took my seat, I nearly gasped at Holt's ballerina body in the vintage cream sequined suit made of a thin jersey material.

Even by Hollywood standards, Holt is a knockout. A lesser--and less beautiful--actress would fail to evoke sympathy for Florence, but Holt's stage experience is clear from her very first lines. She appeared in Love Liza (2002) with Philip Seymour Hoffman and worked prolifically in TV. 

Act II packs a serious dramatic punch. The woman two seats from me sobbed through the last ten minutes and proceeded to talk intensely to a (slightly overwhelmed) male friend for 15 minutes after the play about the parallels between her family and Lancasters, in what sounded more like an analytic session than post-theater chit chat. 

I didn't cry, though I cry easily at movies or TV shows--and some commercials!--but if I'd seen the play at 20 during psychoanalysis, rather than at 42 when my relationship with my parents is entirely untroubled and drama-free, I would may have been a blubbering mess like the 40-something a couple seats over. 

I imagine the intensity of one's response to Act II depends upon the status of one's relationship to one's mother. This is in part a mother/son story, but I'm not convinced the daughter of a woman like Flo would feel significantly differently, aside from some Oedipal dynamics which don't play out the same way with a mother and her daughter. 

(A speculative note: it's very hard for a girl or woman to be significantly less good-looking than her mother. I've known average-looking women with knockouts for moms and it's precisely like Hung, the HBO series with Anne Heche and Thomas Jayne. It's hard to know what "The Vortex" would feel like if Florence had had a daughter instead of a son, but probably things would she would have messed things up in different, but equally problematic, ways.) 

The extended climax in the scene between Florence and Nicky (powerfully rendered by Craig Robert Young) is positively searing. 
The Vortex is short, with a running time of just 75 minutes (90 minutes with the intermission). I didn't know the play and was surprised to be heading back to the Palisades so early. Some directors might have chosen to combine the acts into one, but director Gene Franklin Smith was wise not to do so. Act I and Act II are so tonally (and really, generically) disparate that the emotional highs and lows of this spare play would have blended together like a watercolor left out in the rain without the break. 

Don't miss the Vortex. To get people in the Mad Men mood, a free martini comes with each ticket. And if martinis aren't your thing, there's always good old Coral Beach Cantina a minute away. I met my family there before Suburban Showgirl, the last show I saw at the Malibu Playhouse, and enjoyed the nostalgic sort of rush from the days I spent with a childhood friend whose parents had a house on Broad Beach. 

This part of Malibu (Zuma) hasn't changed much. If the Dune Room is still around, the favorite ex-dive bar of most Malibu AA folks I've known over the years, and you prefer to inhabit the reality of Nicky, you could stop there for a few pre-show cocktails. 
The play runs at Malibu Playhouse through May 18th. Reservations: www.malibuplayhouse.org or 323-960-7711.