SIMON SAYS

posted by James Reel

    Here’s my latest screed from the Tucson Weekly. This time, two Neil Simon plays, each of them actually pretty decent (this from a critic who dislikes most Neil Simon), and benefiting from excellent production. Here’s the lowdown on what’s at Live Theatre Workshop:

    Neil Simon is a hugely popular playwright, but not a consistently good one. Although he's celebrated for his comedies, the plays that draw from the more serious episodes in his own life feature better-drawn characters and elicit a more sincere interest in what happens to them. Broadway Bound, now playing at the UA, is a good example of this, and so is Chapter Two, at Live Theatre Workshop.
    Chapter Two documents Simon's devastation upon the early death of his first wife, his unexpectedly fast courtship of actress Marsha Mason and the expectedly difficult first weeks of their marriage. This being a Neil Simon play, we expect the characters to overcome their problems and live happily ever after; little did Simon know when he wrote this in 1977 that he and Mason would be divorced within five years. If Simon had written Chapter Two after that failure—when he was well into Chapter Three of his life—this play would surely have been darker, or at least more wistful. What he gave us is pretty good, although it shifts awkwardly from Simon's usual clusters of throwaway laugh lines to quiet domestic drama, and doesn't really prepare the secondary characters for the transition.

    The UA's Arizona Repertory Theatre and its earlier incarnation have mounted some impressive large-scale projects in the past decade or two: Nicholas Nickleby, The Kentucky Cycle, Henry IV 1 and 2, The Cider House Rules and maybe one or two others I am by now too stunned to remember.
    I wouldn't put it past them to put on Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia trilogy as soon as they can get the rights. Probably the only thing stopping them from launching August Wilson's 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle is that, as Richard Pryor once observed, there are no black people in Arizona, and that presents a severe casting problem.
    You might not be inclined to include in this august company Neil Simon's three plays documenting the maturation of his alter ego, budding comic playwright Eugene Jerome; the Simon plays hold to a more intimate physical, emotional and, yes, intellectual scale. Yet with Broadway Bound, the concluding installment in Simon's cycle, Arizona Rep's town-and-gown team has again displayed the talent and sustained commitment to match its ambitions.