Archives for July 27, 2012

My drama column returns to The Wall Street Journal today after a two-week hiatus. I flew out to Minneapolis on Wednesday to see the Guthrie Theater’s revival of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys. Here’s an excerpt.
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Do Neil Simon’s plays have a future? Nobody was asking that heretical question a quarter-century ago, back when the author of “The Odd Couple” was still the most popular and successful playwright on Broadway. But American comedy has mutated almost beyond recognition in the ensuing years, and it’s been so long since Mr. Simon’s glory days that you can’t help but wonder whether his quaint one-two-here-comes-the-wisecrack style is destined to vanish into the same memory hole that long ago swallowed up the likes of Bob Hope and Red Skelton.
I recently saw an Off-Broadway production of “Lost in Yonkers” that was so persuasively staged and acted as to make me wonder for the first time whether Mr. Simon’s best plays might possibly be ripe for revival. I felt the much same way after flying out to Minneapolis on Wednesday to catch the Guthrie Theater’s more conventional but genuinely satisfying new production of “The Sunshine Boys,” Mr. Simon’s 1972 play about a comedy team whose long partnership has dissolved in acrimony and spite….
The premise of “The Sunshine Boys” is neatly pointed: Willie Clark (Peter Michael Goetz) and Al Lewis (Raye Birk) worked together for 43 years, at the end of which Al decided that he’d had enough of show business. His abrupt retirement enraged Willie, who wasn’t ready to quit the stage and now regards his old partner with a volatile blend of pride and rancor: “As an actor, no one could touch him…as a human being, no one wanted to touch him.” The two men haven’t spoken for a decade as “The Sunshine Boys” gets underway, and Willie affects to be perfectly happy to leave it that way. Enter Ben (Robert O. Berdahl), his nephew and manager, who hopes to reunite Lewis and Clark for a TV special. Al is game, but Willie isn’t–at least not at first.
As always, Mr. Simon plays for laughs and gets them, especially in the riotous scene in which Lewis and Clark re-enact their knockabout vaudeville act for the TV cameras. But he is also alert to the underlying pathos of the situation, for the septuagenarian Willie, who lives alone in a crumbling residential hotel, is all too clearly in the early stages of dementia (though nobody would have thought to call it that in 1972). Desperate to cling to his independence, he refuses to come to terms with the diminished thing that is his life….
Gisselman, who directed the Guthrie’s 2006 revival of “Lost in Yonkers,” has staged “The Sunshine Boys” in the same straightforward vein. While it’s not especially daring, nobody makes the mistake of hitting the jokes too hard, and there are more than a few moments when pain peers through the laughter….
Mr. Goetz, who reminds me of Art Carney in his irascible old age, has the lion’s share of the best lines and delivers them with growling gusto. Would, though, that Mr. Gisselman had encouraged him to be more brutal…
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Read the whole thing here.

A man of pleasure is a man of pains.
Edward Young, Night Thoughts