Blame It on Noël Coward
Rustin traces The Cottage back to college, when she played Sorel in Coward’s Hay Fever. “The designer had this vision of champagne and cigarettes, so the whole set felt bubbly and heightened,” she remembers. She fell for Coward’s rhythm and style, but not for his women. “In many of his plays, they’re in service to the male character’s story.” So she set out to change that. “I wondered: what would happen if I tried to create a play in the style of Noël Coward, but with women at the center? A story about and for women.” Coward still gets the first word, though. The script opens with his epigraph: “It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”
Bottoms Up!
At one point in the play, one of the characters must polish off an entire bottle of liquor without stopping, transforming into someone very, very drunk while the scene carries on around them. The stage directions add, rather helpfully, “This works best if the audience can see the liquid in the bottle disappear.” What’s really in the bottle remains a closely guarded secret of the props table. Never let it be said that we at Teatro Live! don’t perform our own stunts.
Serenity Now!
The Cottage's Broadway director was none other than Jason Alexander, Seinfeld's very own George Costanza, making his Broadway directorial debut. It opened at the Helen Hayes Theater on July 24, 2023, with Laura Bell Bundy as Sylvia, Eric McCormack as Beau, Lilli Cooper as Marjorie, Alex Moffat as Clarke, Dana Steingold as Dierdre, and Nehal Joshi as Richard.
A Decade in the Making
The Cottage had its world premiere at the Astoria Performing Arts Center in Queens, New York, in November 2013. Sandy Rustin spent nearly a decade honing the script before its Broadway debut in the summer of 2023, letting audience laughter at readings and productions help sharpen the comedy along the way. “It’s been a deliciously long developmental process,” she reflected in a 2025 interview. Now, thirteen years after that first production, The Cottage makes its Professional Canadian Premiere right here at Teatro Live!
A Bad Case of the Mondays
Every affair, confession, and near murder in the play takes place on a single morning: Monday, June 4, 1923. The action begins just before 9:00, and the village church bells chime the hour twice along the way.
