Hearing is believing

The voice is the thing: LA Theatre Works specializes in radio plays, including Noel Coward’s Private Lives.

Private Lives, the beloved Noel Coward marital farce, is generally regarded as easy on the intellect, asking its audiences only to revel in the pomp and puns of high society.

But the LA Theatre Works production which arrives at Diana Wortham Theatre this week raises at least one muse-worthy question: If a play is whittled down to nothing but words, is it still a play?

Costume designers, lighting techs and scenery painters may beg to differ, but LA Theatre Works founding producer Susan Loewenberg contends her company has distilled the art of performance to its essence by restaging theater classics as radio programs. Since LATW launched its radio-theater series in 1987, the group has committed more than 360 titles to tape, calling upon the shiniest stars in Hollywood to lend their voices to such canonical modern works as Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles and Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers. (Try as she might, Loewenberg still hasn’t snared rights to the plays of the late August Wilson or Edward Albee.)

Although 20th-century American plays hog most of the space in the company’s catalog, LATW hasn’t shied away from older, opulent dramas: Loewenberg is apparently on a mission to rescue productions praised for their visual sumptuousness from their own overblown sets.

“Sometimes visual pyrotechnics obscure language,” she says. “A play is much more potent when you listen. You can begin to appreciate the ideas more profoundly.”

Loewenberg says LATW chooses the 10 works for its annual lineup by simply finding the “best plays that have ever been done.” She trusts her corps of actors — which includes almost every American thespian ever named on the back of a Trivial Pursuit card — to translate the scripts into stand-alone productions. These are shows that can be equally appreciated by late-night road trippers listening to XM radio (which broadcasts LATW’s “The Play’s the Thing”), Broadway buffs stranded between the coasts and young drama students nationwide who access the company’s archived recordings through their libraries.

“If you have great writing, you use sound to substitute for the physical set,” explains Loewenberg, recalling a 2005 production of M. Butterfly, a Tony Award-winning show that earned mixed reviews for its acting but stunned critics with its blood-red set. According to Loewenberg, LATW’s version, featuring Broadway vets John Lithgow and B.D. Wong, made scenery superfluous. When the voice is the thing, there’s no room for lackadaisical acting.

“It was quite remarkable,” Loewenberg says. “On stage, you watched a woman become a man. On the radio, with just the sound of his voice, you experienced it in vivid color. I never realized how brilliant the writing was until I heard it.”

Loewenberg concedes the production was a challenge. But LATW has sought out seemingly radio-unfriendly works from the start, building its reputation on a 14-plus-hours-long recording of Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt. Loewenberg, a former actor with a background in soaps, was focusing on producing new works for LATW when Richard Dreyfuss mentioned to her that he’d always wanted to put a play on the radio. Lucky for Loewenberg, Ed Asner, Ted Danson, Helen Hunt and Marsha Mason felt the same way: Babbitt debuted on Los Angeles public radio in 1987, winning the attention and backing of the BBC.

“It put us on the map quite unexpectedly,” Loewenberg says. “It turned out to be a sort of cult classic.”

If LATW can spin success from such lovely-to-read — but hard-to-say — lines as “Regarding each new intricate mechanism — metal lathe, two-jet carburetor, machine gun, oxyacetylene welder — he learned one good realistic-sounding phrase, and used it over and over, with a delightful feeling of being technical and initiated,” imagine what it might do with Coward’s oft-quoted “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is,” and other zingers from Private Lives. Loewenberg is confident that the finely tuned dialogue of the two-bedroom comedy is perfect for the radio.

“Unfortunately, we’re in the era of George W. Bush, when no one can articulate a sentence,” says Loewenberg. “But language is back when you’re watching Private Lives.”

Or listening to it. Coward himself was infatuated with every aspect of the theater, skulking about nightclubs and music halls when he wasn’t performing. He understood the power of great visuals, posing for a photograph in a British journal in the 1920s in which he lazed on his bed in his trademark silk pajamas, hoisting a cigarette and a cocktail shaker. (The caption failed to mention that his bedroom was in his mother’s boardinghouse.)

But the playwright surely would have appreciated LATW fixing its spotlight on his words. Coward himself participated in a 1930s audio recording of the show.

The performance at Diana Wortham Theatre will not be recorded, but will almost exactly replicate the Los Angeles production, which was recently taped for broadcast. “We’ll be doing it in the same way we do it for our audience,” says Loewenberg, who served as the play’s producing director. That means the show is slightly gussied up for viewers — Loewenberg doesn’t recommend anyone watching the performance with their eyes closed.

“It’s a little bit glamorized,” she says. “We’ll be using lighting. The girls will be wearing cocktail dresses.”

The staged radio play also features an on-stage appearance by tour manager Diane Adair, who will be handling sound-effects duties. Whenever someone stops to light a cigarette — which is fairly frequently in Coward’s world — Adair will rush to the microphone to strike a match. Loewenberg describes the lighthearted show as “a love affair between actors and their mikes.”

“For a Southern audience, this show is lots of fun,” says Loewenberg, guessing that an Asheville audience will have an affinity for language unknown in parts north. “The subtleties of human interaction will really be apparent. And it’s short: 70 minutes, and — boom — you’re out.”

Diana Wortham Theatre presents Private Lives by LA Theatre Works on Saturday, Jan. 13 at 8 p.m. and on Sunday, Jan. 14 at 2 p.m. $30/general, $28/seniors, $25/students, $10/children. 257-4530.