Private Lives at Long Beach Performing Arts Center

In Private Lives, Amanda and Elyot can't live together and they can't live apart. When they discover they are honeymooning in the same hotel with their new spouses, they not only fall in love all over again – they learn to hate each other all over again too. Abandoning their new spouses, the reunited couple soon realizes the same issues that ended their first, turbulent marriage continue to plague them. Coward's biting wit and absurd irreverence unmask the conventions and social rituals by which people present their "public'" selves to the world, revealing the "private" passions and motivations that lie beneath a veneer of etiquette and respectability. It's a dark comedy of manners that remains sharply relevant today in a world filled with tabloid scandals and celebrity journalism.