Joan Marcus
So much is an unintended puzzle in The Cottage (Hayes Theater, to Oct 29). The first head-scratcher is that the English cottage as imagined looks far too fancy to be a Cotswolds cottage in 1923. It looks quite suburban and bland-meets-grand, instead of a bucolic bolthole in Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire. Then, the New York Times reported that the playwright Sandy Rustin does not see this Broadway play as a farce, but this is what the play itself is advertised as—and that is the most proximate theatrical genre one could attach to it.
It also grafts a serious feminist message to its ending, which, while welcome for a play set in 1923 being produced in 2023, feels oddly forced and beamed in too obviously from modern times. This is all to say: this critic is not sure what The Cottage is. Sadly, it is not as funny as it thinks it is, or intends to be.
The Cottage, whose all-star cast is directed by Seinfeld alum Jason Alexander, aspires to combine the waspishness of Noël Coward and the set-ups of Michael Frayn. But the thing with good farce is that it needs to keep adding elements to a ticking bomb of revelations, so that the audience is on pins and needles to see everything blow up and be chaotically resolved—keenly watching for delicious mini-detonations before the big explosion.