Berkshires boards Design for Living and R Shomon at Williamstown, The God Committee at Barrington BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Design for Living By Noël Coward. Directed by Gregory Boyd. With Marisa Tomei, Campbell Scott, Steven Weber, Jack Gilpin, and Kristine Nielson. On the Main Stage at the Williamstown Theatre Festival through August 8. R Shomon By Michael John LaChiusa. Suggested by the stories of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, as translated by Takashi Kojima. Directed by Ted Sperling. With Audra McDonald, Henry Stram, Michael C. Hall, Tom Wopat, and Mary Testa. On the Nikos Stage at the Williamstown Theatre Festival (closed). The God Committee By Mark St. Germain. Directed by David Saint. With Gerrit Graham, Kelly Hutchinson, Ron Orbach, David Rasche, Armand Schultz, Michele Shay, and Amy Von Nostrand. Presented by Barrington Stage Company at the Consolati Performing Arts Center, Sheffield, through August 7.

For theater, the Berkshires are Massachusetts’s hub in the summertime. A recent visit there provided never a dull moment. Not every moment was a good one, but a playgoer was never less than engaged during a 26-hour period that afforded a lavish if uneven production of Noël Coward’s audacious 1933 comedy Design for Living and two world premieres. R Shomon is composer/lyricist/librettist Michael John LaChiusa’s jazzily operatic remake of short stories by Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa, including the study of shifting truth that inspired Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1951 film Rashomon. Mark St. Germain’s The God Committee is a ripping tour of a hospital conference room where a group of physicians and others decide who among the variously moribund will get a newly harvested heart. The Coward provides food for the eye, the LaChiusa (which features the sublime Audra McDonald) food for the ear, and the St. Germain food, albeit whipped to soft peaks, for the brain.

Design for Living is what Williamstown is known for: an opulent revival of a not-oft-performed classic shot with a little star power — in this case, Campbell Scott and Marisa Tomei, who with stage and film actor Steven Weber constitute the play’s shifting ménage à trois, wafting up in the world and from Paris to London to New York in various pairings before throwing convention to the wind and forming a blissful sexual sandwich. Hugh Landwehr has designed three gorgeous sets, from a vertical Paris garret whose sloping curtains look like sails to a fussy London flat that’s all flowered upholstery overhung by a chandelier wearing iron feathers to a posh New York penthouse in which marble flirts with chrome and famous works of art are hung. Trouble is, it takes so long to change these fabulous sets that the intermissions rival the acts in length and the comedy seems attenuated if daring for its time. (Coward had already shocked the English with his 1925 The Vortex, and Design for Living had to debut, with Coward, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne, in New York before being allowed to show its amoral face, in 1939, in London.)

Gregory Boyd’s production brings to the proceedings a breezy elegance vying with the absurd while at the same time allowing the characters, initially constrained by their own kneejerk jealousies, to suffer. Scott and Weber are dashing child men, Bobbsey Twin dandies dueling with diction as painter Otto and playwright Leo, each of whom loves bohemian muse and decorator Gilda, who can resist neither. (Some productions include a homosexual subtext, but in this one, Otto and Leo smolder for Gilda, not each other — though they do share a sodden embrace after downing a whole decanter of brandy when Gilda leaves both of them.)

Tomei, however, hasn’t the right rhythm for Coward. The playwright said of the character, "Gilda needs to have a touch of the gipsy. She needs to be a bit common." And Tomei, with a baby-doll sexiness and hard edges, gets that. But she doesn’t have the elocutionary crispness necessary for Coward. And with the exception of a slinky white gown in the third act, her costumes — chic, big-panted affairs that would have looked great on Kate Hepburn — swallow her up. Jack Gilpin, as the art dealer who is friend and counsel to the trio, blusters nicely in the third act — in which he gets to spit words like "insupportable" and "offensive" — but he makes the character more wooden than Coward does. Kristine Nielsen, however, in the smaller role of Leo and Gilda’s addled London housekeeper, gives an antic performance worthy of Noises Off.

R Shomon is harder to assess. LaChiusa’s score — which combines Japanese minimalism with jazz, soaring melody, infectious patter, even a hint of calypso — is the most satisfying I have heard from the Obie-winning composer of Hello Again, First Lady Suite, and Broadway’s The Wild Party and Marie Christine. And hearing McDonald sing it, unmiked, in WTF’s 96-seat Nikos space is thrilling. The entire cast, in fact, does justice to the music, in which spare, percussive orchestrations put an anxious edge on vocal melody. And Six Feet Under star Michael C. Hall brings a preening dangerousness to the thief in the Rashomon remake. Moreover, the staging by Ted Sperling (McDonald’s music director), with musical staging by Jonathan Butterel, is economic and dramatic, as are the production’s Japanese scenic trappings.

The trouble lies in the concept. The two acts update and remove to Central Park several tales by the Japanese writer Akutagawa (1892-1927) demonstrating that truth is not an absolute. Act one, R Shomon, transplants the stories that inspired Kurosawa to 1951 New York, where the film is in its American premiere (and the "a" has fallen out of its title on the marquee). A cocky young thief with West Side Story moves lures a pin-striped businessman and his hot young wife to the park, where he either rapes or seduces the woman before her tied-up husband, who winds up dead. Akutagawa’s woodcutter witness is replaced by a janitor at the theater where Rashomon is being shown. As in the film, the crime is re-enacted according to the versions told by each of the characters: the janitor’s, the thief’s, and the wife’s to the police, the dead man’s through a medium.

In act two, Akutagawa’s "The Dragon" becomes Gloryday, in which a priest suffering a crisis of faith in the wake of September 11 cynically promotes a miracle set to take place in the park at a particular time, at which climactic stroke it may or may not actually occur. Each act opens with a bookended half of a third story, Kesa and Morito, in which a married woman and her lover, dressed in traditional Japanese fashion, prepare in turn for a last, murderous night of love, applying similar, sensual lyrics to the same haunting tune.

R Shomon is more successful than the contrived Gloryday. But the frame story becomes less plausible when divorced from ninth-century Japanese notions of honor. (Would a savvy businessman really follow a stranger into Central Park in the middle of the night to look for buried mob treasure?) There are things LaChiusa could do to improve the show (which is in development), including dropping the pretentious missing-letter metaphor. But the music is so thoroughly integrated into the frame that he can hardly scrap it. He just has to hope that a rich score makes up for a strained idea. It’s been known to work in opera.

The God Committee, on the other hand, would make a great TV movie. St. Germain, the author of Ears on a Beatle and the award-winning Camping with Henry and Tom, was moved to write the piece by a friend’s father’s experience in waiting for a heart. Every year, we’re told, more than 70,000 Americans with incurable cardiac disease wait for a new organ, but only 10,000 hearts become available. Journalist Shana Alexander coined the term "God committee" for the teams of surgeons, psychiatrists, and social workers who at every hospital transplant center decide who gets the bloody, beating new lease on life. St. Germain borrows the moniker for his play, whose main agenda, though he deems it important, he doesn’t quite trust. Thus we get all manner of personal tragedy, interpersonal bickering, and shady manipulation among the committee members to create drama. And if that doesn’t do it, there are the frantic speaker-phone calls from the surgeon airlifting the heart, who ends up on a motorcycle winging his way through St. Patrick’s Day parade traffic while trying to keep his organ cooler out of the hands of revelers who think what’s inside is free beer!

None of this is resoundingly credible, but for a medical-issue drama, The God Committee sure keeps you on the edge of your seat. Moreover, the playwright provides some clever twists, setting up good- and bad-guy doctors who turn out to be less polarized than they seem. Heading the Catholic New York hospital’s transplant committee is white-coated, humane Dr. Jack Klee (David Rasche), who, it turns out, has terminal stomach cancer and is looking for a legacy. At the opposite end of the table is black-clad cardiac surgical whiz and all-around mean spirit Dr. Alex Gorman (Armand Schultz).

Also on board: a young female resident (Kelly Hutchinson) standing in for her boss, the guy on the harrowing ride with the heart; a wisecracking but lonely wheelchair-bound social worker (Ron Orbach); an African-American nurse (Tony nominee Michele Shay) who argues that character, not just medical condition, should count in the contest; a female psychiatrist (Trinity and Huntington vet Amy Von Nostrand) who has recently lost her daughter to suicide; and a hospital-board member (Gerrit Graham) who used to be a trial attorney but has recently become a priest. The last has been sent by the board to make sure the hospital is kept out of legal hot water, since one of the contenders for the heart is the wastrel son of a local media tsar who has offered a $30 million donation in exchange for his son’s being allowed to jump the line.

David Saint directs the production, which is well appointed and sharply performed. And St. Germain peppers the debate with some excellent one-liners. But there is just too much going on here, especially in the boil-over of long-simmering personal animosities when urgency and professionalism would seem to call for cooler heads. Much more excitement on the table and the audience will need the new heart.