A Song at Twilight, presented by Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, continues Wed.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 2 pm; through March 7. Tickets: $15-$30. Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles; 310.477.2055 or odysseytheatre.com.

“Comedies of manners swiftly become obsolete when there are no longer any manners.”

–Noel Coward

God love Ron Sossi and those Odyssey Theatre Ensemble folks for having the manners to keep Noel Coward from becoming obsolete to Los Angeles audiences.

Sir Noel Pierce Coward was one of the greatest wits of the twentieth century and according to well-established reports made the English, well, English. He found fame as an actor, director, cabaret star, songwriter, filmmaker, novelist and playwright. His work in theatre forever altered the perceptions of dialog. His natural, more conversational style made hits of his plays and found an audience eager for their film adaptations.

Even though he preferred drinking a cup of cocoa to being in Hollywood, he won a 1943 Academy Honorary Award for his World War II film In Which They Serve. In addition, he was involved in one capacity or another in almost 100 film and television productions around the world.

Oops…back to theatre. We do like to claim him, especially when there’s a Coward production in town.  Is it Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter, Blithe Spirit?  No…it’s A Song at Twilight, his last full-length play.

He wanted to write a play in which he could “act once more before I fold my bedraggled wings.” His lead character is writer Hugo Latymer who deals with a loving wife, a cagey ex-mistress and the secret of his longstanding male lover.

“I've sometimes thought of marrying - and then I've thought again.”

Was Latymer purely fiction, based on Somerset Maugham or auto-biographical? The fun is in the whispering…and in the playing for Orson Bean, Alley Mills and Laurie O’Brien–the same way it was for Sir Noel below and Lilli Palmer with whom he premiered the play in 1966.

Many believe Coward wanted to skewer some of his famous colleagues for their pretense of heterosexuality–hiding, closeting or attacking their true natures. He said little directly but wrote much and wore a sly smile somewhere on his sleeve.

Orson Bean and Laurie O'Brien

A Song at Twilight had a relatively triumphant opening in London. The critic for The Daily Mail may have given you the best taste of what to expect at the Odyssey these days, when he said “as the curtain fell last night I felt oddly elated as if I had recaptured the flavour of an exclusive drink which one tasted when young but has never been mixed quite right since. I know the name of it now: not mannerism, not bravura, not histrionics, but style.”

Twilight was part of a trio of plays collectively entitled Suite in Three Keys, all of which are set in the same suite in a luxury hotel in Switzerland. In reflecting on the success of Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite two years later, Coward mused, “Such a good idea having different plays all played in a hotel suite! I wonder where he got it from?” Coward was seldom without a pithy observation especially about theatre…and its players.

“I’m an enormously talented man, and there’s no use pretending that I’m not.”

It’s hard to remember a time when you didn’t know of Noel Coward or remember something fun about him. The same is probably true of LA’s own Orson Bean. Apart from being a second cousin to Calvin Coolidge–seriously, did you know Orson chose his name after that Citizen Kane show-off? How about that Bean was blacklisted in the ’50s for his then liberal political views? Or that he guest-hosted The Tonight Show over a 100 times, not only in the Johnny days but back in Jack Paar’s as well.

Orson Bean

You may also remember seeing him for seven seasons on To Tell the Truth but did you know he enjoyed much success on Broadway, including a Tony nod for Subways Are for Sleeping? So when asked if he had any fears about playing Coward, he responds resolutely, “No. I always thought I’d be just right for him and I am. I don’t know what it is with me. I think I can play anything. I think I can play Juliet!”

“Never mind, dear, we’re all made the same though some more than others.”

In real life, Bean’s Juliet is iconic TV mom from The Wonder Years and current star of The Bold and the Beautiful, Alley Mills. In Twilight, she is Bean’s again, playing the wife Hilde Latymer. ”Orson is a consummate actor,” she says. ”It’s called a play because we’re supposed to play. It’s fun!” he says.

“I’m different. I like to work on it. I could rehearse for a year. I love character study. Orson says, ‘Oh, shut up and do it!’ We’re different. So, working with him made me nervous at first. But, it ended up, we all had a blast. I go around the globe one way and he goes right through it.

“Having done Shakespeare and Shaw, it helps. Shaw helps a lot. You have to play tennis. If you drop the ball with Coward, you’re dead. Whack, whack, whack and somebody wins the point.”

Being the worrier in the family, she feared there wouldn’t be enough time to do Coward justice. ”I was doing the soap and rehearsing, and wondered if I’d have to cut corners. But, we all learned our lines before rehearsal started. And, I got my shoes first too. I need to get my feet so I went online and got my pumps first thing. 1966 shoes. Somebody in London sent them to me. $24. Crocodile. Can’t beat it!” Hmmm…like Dorothy in Oz, watch for those slippers on stage.

“You ask my advice about acting? Speak clearly, don’t bump into the furniture and if you must have motivation, think of your pay packet on Friday.”

Laurie O'Brien

The third member of this acting extravaganza, playing the ex-mistress Carlotta Gray, is multi-award winner Laurie O’Brien. She has long been an acting legend in Los Angeles since her wild days as the lead in the Odyssey’s production of Mary Barnes. She won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for that show. She won the same award again later for her equally challenging role of Denise Savage in John Patrick Shanley’s Savage in Limbo at the Cast Theatre.

She continued her winning ways recently, playing Meta in Padua Playwrights production of Times Like These. For that, she won the 2003 Ovation Award for Lead Actress, and after the play’s two-year run in Los Angeles, played the role again in San Francisco and New York. ”The characters I played were so meaty,” she says. ”Every night was a new night with brilliant writing for all of them. How else can you go to those dark places?

“One of the reasons I can play dark people is because I’m not one of them. I can trust the words will bring me out of them. I had the advantage of working all those years before Los Angeles in mental hospitals and I got to know those people. I promised the universe I’d tell their story and I got to fulfill that promise.

“People think I’m so serious because of it so I get cast that way. That’s why I like playing somebody in control, lighter, pretty like Carlotta. I don’t have to be blood and spit. But, when Orson first called me to play it, I said no. I was used to LORT contracts for so long, I felt I didn’t want to go back to work for so little. But, he was insistent and once I read the script…I’m an actor, and actors act.

“And, industry people lose track of you too. Spin, spin, spin. They have you up on a shelf, especially when you’re getting older, up even on a higher shelf and getting dusty. So if you get a character to play like Carlotta and they can say, ‘She looks pretty good and she can be funny.’ That can’t be bad.”

“Someday I suspect, when Jesus has definitely got me for a sunbeam, my works may be adequately assessed.”

As you can see from the quotes scattered throughout the article, Noel Coward had a way, a very famous way, with words. It’s one of the reasons audiences and theatre professionals have remained loyal fans.  “Nothing about this surprised me,” says Bean, “except the incredible quality of the construction of the play.

“I didn’t realize it until the audiences came and were rapt. No coughs. And, the laughs came. It gets better every night. When you’re doing really good writing, our work gets deeper and deeper and deeper. It’s always the writing. The writer never gets enough credit.”

Alley Mills

Unlike husband Bean, Mills has had a past with Coward. She played in Present Laughter in Hartford, Connecticut regional theatre and also in Tonight at 8:30 at Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice. As for Twilight, she says, “This isn’t typical Coward, it’s late Coward. It’s not to be done like Private Lives. It’s not presentational in that Coward kind of way. This play has to have a belly to it. We get a lot of laughs because it has a belly.

O’Brien played Elvira in Blithe Spirit in junior high school. ”It was my first full-length play,” she remembers. ”I cut my teeth on Coward. He’s a master. The class, the comedy, the subtlety, the challenge of the accent…you want to come up to what it is, and what it can be. And, that’s humility as an artist. One’s a better artist if you keep your humility.”

“Wit is like caviar – it should be served in small portions and not spread about like marmalade.”

“I don’t do anything,” Bean reveals. ”I let the story tell itself. In one scene, I’m left alone on stage with an adorable sexy waiter, and flirt. It stops when my wife comes back. She knows…and, that’s a total surprise for him because he thought he pulled it off beautifully.

“He deals with it in language. Hugo loves language because Noel Coward loves language. The male ego, thinking he’s in charge. It’s fun to get hit with a pie and have the audience laugh at you. Funny, but quite dark.”

“The challenge of the language is a great joy,” O’Brien echoes. ”Coward makes it easy. There are rhythms and certain alliterations you have to do word-for-word because then the comedy will be there. It’s a partnership with the playwright and the actor.

“It actually makes it easy to remember the lines…like ‘It seems a pity that posterity should be deprived…’ or, ‘Hugo, you are positively stampeding toward the quiet grave, aren’t you?’”

For Mills, the play is elusive and full of secrets. “None of the characters know each other knows,” she relishes. “The fun is finding out. I know Hugo is not a happy camper and I don’t want him to die that way. So I hope the shit’s going to hit the fan.

“My character deeply loved once and it was horrific because of the Holocaust. She didn’t think she’d make it. Those survivors don’t always make it. Hugo took her in at that point. It’s so profound. One of my favorite lines is when I’m confronted by Carlotta, demanding to know how I can put up with my husband’s affairs. ‘Because he’s all I have.’ So all is forgiven. That’s the other side of Coward.”

“I never care who scored the goal or which side won the silver cup- I never learned to bat or bowl- but I heard the curtain going up.”

Bean was the first to hear it going up on Twilight. ”I went back east in June,” he says, “in Arthur Miller’s The Price. The director James Glossman knew of A Song at Twilight and said Alley and I should do it. We had seen Alan Rickman in Coward on Broadway, and I thought if I can be half as good as that…

“So we started and brought it to Marilyn Fox at Pacific Resident Theatre where I had just done The Browning Version by Terrence Rattigan. It’s a big success and I had great fun playing the villain. The audience loves a villain. Iago steals it from Othello. Donald Duck from Mickey Mouse. ”But, we couldn’t work it out. PRT already had an English play scheduled. So we went to Ron Sossi and he grabbed it.

Mills also appreciated director Glossman’s choice for them. ”I didn’t know James and I really loved working with this guy. It’s amazing at my age that I can still get to a new level as an actor, moment-to-moment. I’m growing as a human being and on stage.

“Jim noticed I’m completely at home with myself. I’m more present. Klugman told him the same thing last year. That he’s happier than he’s ever been. In theatre, you never know what’s going to happen, and you need to stay open to that.  Even opening night was easier. Usually that matters to me but not this time. I didn’t feel the pressure.”

O’Brien feels that “openings are not real. There’s so much anxiety around it, about whether you can do it. People don’t experience the play the same way. Too many things are so stacked onto it.

“Now the fun begins and the communication with the audience. My whole reason for acting is reaching people; opening night gets in the way. Good reviews are important though so people will come.”

“Work is much more fun than fun.”

And, the people do come. They get to see a play by a world-renowned playwright, performed by well-known actors who live, love and work in Los Angeles. Bean has his show-must-go-on regional theatre gigs and a recurring role as Roy Bender opposite two-time Emmy winner and Ovation Award winner Kathryn Joosten as Mrs. McClusky in Desperate Housewives. As in Twilight, they prove that romance can be a valentine sent or received at any age by any gender.

Mills continues as Pamela Douglas, a regular on The Bold and the Beautiful. ”I started in a heavy part for 10 episodes but now I’m bi-polar…and have no boobs, so I’m the comic sister. There are some insanely good actors there. I love going to work,” she says. ”I didn’t know that world and it’s fun. As long as you know you have the freedom to go back to theatre.”

O’Brien, who is also the voice of Baby Piggy on The Muppet Babies, enhances her LA actor’s life as an owner and gardener-in-chief of the greatly reviewed Firefly Bistro in Pasadena. It serves American cuisine with a sassy twist, all under a big tent. It’s a family affair with her step-daughter, chef son-in-law and leading man husband of 21 years, actor Carl Weintraub. ”We met in Savage in Limbo,” she says. He’s a wonderful, open man.  People come to see him there.”

Guess you’ll have to go to West LA to see O’Brien there, together with those magic Beans-Orson and Alley. Then, you too can say, “I’ve been to a marvelous party.”

“Trust your instincts. If you have no instincts, trust your impulses.”

Feature image of Laurie O’Brien, Alley Mills and Orson Bean by Ron Sossi

Article by Geo Hartley