This side-splitting comedy by Noel Coward gives us the Bliss family, who is bohemian to the extreme.  The mother is an actress who has left the stage cut continues to wring melodrama out of every situation.  The father is a novelist who is conducting research.  Their son and daughter are beautiful but have less than ideal manners.  Each family member invites a guest for the weekend, but hilarity ensures when all end up pairing off with another’s guest.  This is nothing out of the ordinary to the family, but the guests have no idea what has just hit them.

    Anyone who stands on grocery check-out lines, knows that Hollywood is filled with crazy people, unhappy actors who self-destruct in public. Not everyone in Hollywood is crazy to be sure, but, then, not all Frenchmen smoke. This craziness is echoed partly by our politicians and our sports stars. But actors have a special brand of the disease
   
    We live in an age where nothing is shocking. That such and such was done is never a shocker, but that so and so did it comes often as a surprise which we get used to quickly.  The irony is that while nothing is shocking every little error becomes a headline on the grocery check-out lanes.
    Before these suggestive headlines and explicit articles, there was such a thing as open secrets. For example, many reporters and politicians knew of President Kennedy’s extramarital flings. Similarly, Spencer Tracy’s affair with Katherine Hepburn was widely known by the Hollywood community but no-one spoke about it. Noel Coward, the British author of Hay Fever, was a gay male. His predilections were well known among his friends and colleagues, but neither the British nor American theater-goers were so well informed. The sexual details of a public person’s life, simply, were not for public consumption.
   
    This era of open secrets led to some wonderful historical ironies. Spencer Tracy’s status as an American icon rested on the perception that he was a good, honest, church-going man faithful to his wife. But in fact he was a self-destructive nasty alcoholic who detested his wife. The historical irony for the gay Coward is that he was the epitome of manly sophistication that heterosexual men aspired to. Think of Cary Grant or, today, George Clooney, and you see what Noel Coward created, but even more so.
   
    Noel Coward (1899-1973) belonged to a world that never existed; he helped create it and he nourished it with his presence and his plays. It was a world of sophistication; conversations were superficially witty and wittily superficial. Everyone looked good and wore impeccable manners. Clothes were uncomfortable adornments that required wearers to seem at ease and move gracefully. A cigarette could be a sign of one’s elegance as could a man’s silk smoking jacket. And over this world, Noel Coward reigned supreme. It was a world of the theatre, British especially, but we Americans still imported much of our ‘culture’ for the first sixty years of the twentieth century. (Then the Beatles arrived!)
   
    Here’s an anecdote told me recently by Robert Kiernan, my high school English teacher some forty years ago. In Kiernan’s words:  “Noel Coward was fond of relating about his squiring a young actress to a theater in darkest Hempsted.  ‘If it's a play with a message,’ she said demurely, ‘I shan't dress.’” There’s a whole world inside that young woman’s statement. The notion that one ‘dresses’ to go to the theater is part of that world; that one shouldn’t take serious plays seriously is another. And the final clue is the word shan’t. Who uses the contraction for shall not? Only people bred to perceive a difference between shall and will, a distinction that even Fowler, that old schoolmarm, conceived as all but lost by the beginning of the twentieth century.
   
    This world is the setting for Hay Fever, the household of the Blisses. Conversations are superficial and witty as they must be. Everyone is self-absorbed and flirtatious.—The title speaks less to rhinitis than to amorous frivolity, and, thus, relationships and attitudes are always morphing ambiguously. And the play is about a well-known actress and her playwright husband and their two adult-aged children: a theatrical family. Into this household, four unprepared invitees arrive and the fun starts.
   
    In essence, the play is A Weekend with the Bliss Family; in that regard, it compares to our reality TV. shows that follow famous people in their lives. It also has that gossipy quality we find in our check-out line magazines—only Coward’s vision is much gentler.
   
    He once explained that he wrote the play after spending a weekend at the house of American playwright Hartley Manners and his wife Laurette Taylor, who has inspired such adjectives as “over-the-top” and “extraordinarily theatrical.” These words were not used in reviews of her performances on Broadway so much as by her friends speaking of her off-stage. Coward felt himself lucky that no-one had written Hay Fever before him.
   
    Like us without the benefit of People Magazine and Star, the guests in this play have no idea just how crazy theater people can be.