West Bay Community Theater’s (WBCT) first production of 2023 continues the tradition of visiting different Rhode Island playhouses while its home in Wickford is under construction. This time around, WBCT is partnering with the Courthouse Center for the Arts in West Kingston to present PRIVATE LIVES, a curio of a bygone day that explores the juxtaposition of romantic entanglements and devil-may-care globetrotting in a world surging toward peril. Set in 1930, against a backdrop of global Depression and looming world war, two couples with relative affluence and privilege are locked in a quagmire of desperation, passion, and existential crisis. Noel Coward’s trademark deadpan wit informs what is, at its heart, a struggle for understanding among people whose tragic lives behind closed doors betray their outer privilege.

Revived in 2002 by the Royal National Theatre in a production that sparkled on Broadway, PRIVATE LIVES is one of the most sophisticated, entertaining plays ever written. Elyot and Amanda, once married and now honeymooning with new spouses at the same hotel, meet by chance, reignite the old spark and impulsively elope. After days of being reunited, they again find their fiery romance alternating between passions of love and anger. Their aggrieved spouses appear and a roundelay of affiliations ensues as the women first stick together, then apart, and new partnerships are formed. A uniquely humorous play boasting numerous successful Broadway runs with stars like Coward himself, Alan Rickman, Laurence Olivier, Tallulah Bankhead, Gertrude Lawrence, Tammy Grimes, Richard Burton, and Elizabeth Taylor.