Eight decades ago, in Strange Interlude, Eugene O’Neill created the longest role yet written for an actress: Nina Leeds, a woman torn between two men. Groucho Marx got the gist of it in Animal Crackers, when he observed to a couple of cuties: “We three would make an ideal couple. Pardon me while I have a strange interlude.” But O’Neill fleshed it out a bit and, as was his wont, wound up with a good five hours of unrelenting tragedy. Lynne Fontanne was cast as Nina and asked her friend Noel Coward for some advice on the role, which required him to endure two sittings of what he described as “the whole bloody nine acts of that bore.”

Five years later, Coward offered his own take on triangular couples in Design for Living, once again with Lynne Fontanne as the woman and with Alfred Lunt and Coward himself as the men. In its summer revival, the Williamstown Theatre Festival somehow manages to turn Coward’s lightly worn ménage à trois into a ménage à trois heures. No comedy should last three hours, because nothing is funny that long. The elongation of the play isn’t due to the Coward Estate’s discovery of an extra couple of acts in a bottom drawer, but because Hugh Landwehr’s sleekly glamorous sets are so extravagant their erection and dismantling require two intermissions almost as long as the acts. The play itself is barely the sum of its own pair of