Playwright: Neil Simon
At: Eclipse Theatre Company at
the Greenhouse, 2257 N. Lincoln
Phone: 773-871-3000; $25
Runs through: Aug. 31
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
When Come Blow Your Horn opened in 1961, who'd have guessed that the history of American theater would someday recognize two Neil Simons? There's the jocular Simon, author of domestic comedies rooted in the classical premise of two people with conflicting temperaments running afoul of one another. And there's the existential Simon, whose bittersweet accounts of family tensions revealed his own troubled childhood, the source of the many happy reconciliations conjured in his lonely artist's imagination. The transition is usually demarcated at 1970, with the premiere of The Gingerbread Lady, but hints of unease can be spotted in his 1969 trilogy, Plaza Suite.
The linking element for these three one-act plays is the title suite in Manhattan's luxury Plaza Hotel. In 'Visitor From Mamaroneck,' a middle-aged suburban couple celebrating their 23rd anniversary discover that they have grown apart to an extent that may spell the end of their marriage. By contrast, the middle-aged spouses in 'Visitor From Forest Hills' are so acclimated to their squabbling that only their daughter's terror on her wedding day makes them pause—momentarily—to consider the marital example they have set. Sandwiched between these curiously unresolved sketches is 'Visitor From Hollywood,' in which a glamorous film producer reunites with his former high school sweetheart for a brief escape from the lives they have both chosen.
So in 2008, do you indulge nostalgic 'tired-businessman' Simon fans enjoying a chortle at the superficiality of affluent New Yorkers? Or do you appeal to contemplative audience members searching amid the parochial period references for a lesson to take home with them? Director Steve Scott attempts to bridge the stylistic gaps, his actors retaining their comic timing while simultaneously imposing a wry inflection on now-antiquated intergender dynamics. Overall, he succeeds, despite the imbalance of ages represented among the cast members ( with only Cheri Chenoweth and Jon Steinhagen seeming to be whom their characters proclaim themselves to be ) and a final moment that sidesteps the question of whether the reluctant bride's fears for her future will, indeed, be manifested.
The most engaging of the three plays, ironically, is the one most problematic in its own time: Nathaniel Swift's tinseltown mogul and Frances Wilkerson's homegirl emerge, not as the familiar seductive slicker and naive hick, but—if your suspension of disbelief can sustain the notion of a cross-racial teenage romance flourishing in the Tenafly, N.J., of 1951—a pair of older-but-wiser waifs evenly matched in both their calculations and desires.
