Susanne Nitter, the Publick's producing director and a familiar presence in its outdoor summer shows, bears the heaviest burden as Gilda, the apex of the romantic triangle here. An interior decorator torn between two men -- who, scandalously when the play premiered in 1933, are also torn between her and each other -- Gilda is the sort of woman who, if she ever did exist outside Sir Noel's charming but misogynist brain, is scarcely imaginable now. Frolicsome, frivolous, and madly melodramatic, she's a caricature, not a character -- a fey sketch of a flighty female, and not a particularly persuasive one at that.
So it's perhaps understandable that Nitter tries to turn her into a human being, but it's also a mistake. To invest Gilda with deep human emotion is like pasting a realistic photograph in the middle of a pen-and-ink drawing: It exposes the artifice of everything around it, but it also looks painfully out of place.
Diego Arciniegas (the Publick's artistic director), as the charismatic playwright, Leo, and Gabriel Kuttner, as the slightly less sparkly but more cuddly painter Otto, fare better, and not just because Coward gave the men all the best lines. The two actors have a playful rhythm together that lets them move adroitly through all the shifting humors of the plot, from love to rage to jealousy and back again. And their slow, sodden descent into the famous drunken scene is both hilarious and sweet.
But you never for a moment are tempted to think of them as actual people, and that's as it should be. In choosing this work for the Publick's rare foray into the winter season, at the Boston Center for the Arts, Arciniegas and Veloudos (himself the Publick's leader before he took over at the Lyric Stage Company) have said they found it strikingly topical in its examination of unconventional lifestyles. That's true. But it's not a political tract, and whenever the production tries to hit those underlying themes too hard, it stumbles.
Mostly, though, so long as Gilda isn't getting too emotionally complex, Veloudos keeps things skimming along. Nigel Gore, as the stuffily earnest Ernest, who tries to lure Gilda away from her beloved boys, strikes the right notes throughout. So do the other supporting actors in some small but telling roles. But J. Michael Griggs's Matisse-ly graffiti'd set and Rafael Jaen's bulky costumes feel too heavy, too clunky, and just too stolid for Coward's world.
Coward may well have been, as the Publick suggests, making a serious point beneath his silliness: Don't judge people just for loving each other. But the secret of his art -- though it may also have been the misfortune of his life -- was that he never quite said it out loud.
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.
