"Hay Fever" in Woodstock

Fever Pitch

by Jay Blotcher, July 28, 2011

While there is no evidence that playwright Noel Coward ever ventured into the Mid-Hudson Valley, he created the perfect farce about the Valley weekender.

To be fair, Coward’s 1924 play “Hay Fever” was inspired by a friend from the London theater. But if you’ve ever watched your neighbors from Manhattan putter around the garden in $200 designer jeans or swan around the farmer’s market, you know the entertainment value of city folk in country environs. So did Coward; “Hay Fever” concerns the Bliss family, self-absorbed folk capable of transforming a mere breakfast into an Elizabethan tragedy. When each of the four members—Judith, David, Sorel, and Simon—invites a guest to their country home without telling the others, chaos predictably ensues.

While the comedy was originally situated in Cookham, Berkshire, a new staging of “Hay Fever” transfers the action to the Mid-Hudson Valley, literally. Shauna Kanter, artistic director of the Manhattan-based VOICETheatre company, will stage what she calls “a comedy of bad manners” in her Bearsville home. Audience members will be placed on the perimeter of the action. When an actor exits the scene, he walks through a door, not through the wings.

VOICETheatre is no stranger to site-specific productions. The company, assembled in 1988, launched its inaugural show in a warehouse in Paris. “After freezing our petuddies off,” said Kanter, the show transferred to the venerable New York venue La MaMa Experimental Theater Company. VOICETheatre has since performed contemporary and classic works in Germany, London, Scotland, Poland, the Middle East and throughout the United States. “Hay Fever” will play nine performances during a three-week period.

The setting for the play is a 1945 house situated two miles from the center of Woodstock. Kanter has updated the setting of the 1920s story to the late 1950s.

“Because Woodstock has long been a place where people have come to escape the city and frolic,” said Kanter, who directs this show, “Hay Fever not only fits the environment of Woodstock but [also] the Bliss family, a family mostly made up of artists could easily live in Woodstock.”