26 June 2009: Simon, Last of the Red Hot Lovers
New Century Theatre, Theatre 14, Smith College. Directed by Jack Neary
This is the first of four plays constituting the nineteenth season of New Century Theatre. The artistic co-producer, Sam Rush, was recently interviewed as saying that, in this post-meltdown period, he decided that the best thing to do was to produce all comedy. This Neil Simon play is the first of four comedies aimed at that target. It’s a funny play — Neil Simon is invariably funny — but that’s about all that can be said for it as a play. The date of the play is 1960s, and it shows its age rather badly. It’s supposed to be all about sex and affairs and philandering, but it is in fact a very chaste play, well within the bounds of 1960s respectability. Yes, I said 1960s respectability.
Barney Cashman is the proprietor of a fish restaurant who has been married to Thelma for twenty-three years. He is a man in his early or mid-forties, and for the past six months he has wanted to find out, after having been completely faithful to Thelma for those twenty-three years, what it would be like to be with another woman. Each of the three acts of the play is devoted to an experiment that proves to be — the phrase will be pardoned — abortive. One can predict from the start that the one thing we are not going to see on stage is actual sexual activity. Consequently, Simon’s self-imposed dramaturgical task is to write an act, and then another, and then another, that resolutely avoids and dodges what one might have thought was the hypothetically obligatory scene of sexual intercourse. But then, of course, you can’t put that sort of thing on stage; so there has to be a series of divergences and ruses to blithely avoid the inevitable. Simon is very good, it must be said, at avoiding the inevitable; but in the case of this particular play a good bit of his strategy turns out to be rather lame. The first act especially ended up feeling rather flat. The second act picked up because of the character of the woman whom Barney invited to share a brief afternoon with him at his mother’s temporarily vacant apartment. The third act was still a little more interesting because this time the woman who showed up was a good friend of his and Thelma’s and was, in the bargain, a high profile depressive. After three inconclusive and frustrating experiences, Barney is ready to pick up the phone, call his wife, and ask Thelma to meet him at his mother’s apartment for what we know and understand will be an entirely legitimate “fling.”
This is pretty tame, pretty boring stuff. And the overall feeling one has about it is that it is superficial even by Neil Simon’s high standards of superficiality. What is much more interesting to contemplate is the theatrical, rather than the dramatic, aspect of the show. There are four actors required: a first-rate comic actor to play Barney Cashman; and three expert and very well differentiated actresses to play Elaine, Bobbi, and Jean