Confession time: I’ve been avoiding Profile Theatre
all season. Profile’s mission—to devote each season to the work
of a single playwright—is a great one, giving audiences the
chance to really delve into a writer’s body of work. Supplemented by
readings and talkbacks, Profile’s approach encourages a consideration
of plays as literature in a way that most companies’
love-’em-and-leave-’em approaches do not.
That being said, if you’re not excited about the playwright
selected, you’re SOL. Suffice to say that it was rather difficult for
this reviewer to get excited about this season’s selection of Neil
Simon, one of the most prolific and frequently produced playwrights in
the English language (Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi
Blues, Lost in Yonkers, The Odd Couple, and so on).
This reviewer, in fact, would be perfectly content to never see another
production of The Odd Couple again—that includes the
female version. And because sometimes when there’s nothing nice to say,
even the Mercury chooses to say nothing at all–we haven’t
run a single review of a Profile show all season.
A sense of creeping obligation compelled me at last to check in on
the final fully staged production of their 2009 season, The Sunshine
Boys, which handily demonstrates that Profile is still doing the
same things right they’ve always done. The Sunshine Boys is one of
Simon’s most frequently produced plays, a wacky heart-tugger about a
vaudeville comedy duo that is reunited after years of estrangement.
Profile’s production is well paced, and as funny as can be
expected—Richard Mathews and Michael Berkson are appropriately
batty as the aging vaudevillians, embracing the over-the-top antics of
their grouchy characters with obvious, contagious enthusiasm. Thom
Bray’s direction emphasizes brisk pacing and silly sight gags—it
is an absolutely solid production of a play that does not ever need to
be produced again.
Next season, Profile tackles Horton Foote, the recently deceased
playwright and screenwriter who won a Pulitzer for his play The
Young Man from Atlanta and an Academy Award for his screen
adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. Foote is critically well
regarded but lesser known, with a body of work that focuses on the
lives of small-town Americans. He is, in short, the type of playwright
we count on Profile to introduce us to—and we can all just put
the Neil Simon era behind us.
Hmm… let’s see what rhymes with grudging… budging… fudging… prejudging.
“Been there, done that” is as valid and as easy as any other justification for your truancy from every other Profile production this season. For all I know, editorial oversight may have also influenced you to skip the way-too-familiar “Fools” and the over-produced “Jake’s Women”
Confession time: I wasn’t excited about the playwright selected either, for pretty much the same reasons you articulate, but neither was I SOL: as the lucky SO of a designer, my ticket to ‘Biloxi Blues’ was comped. I am not burdened by the expectation of attending every show my SO works on, so the most I risked was the loss of a couple of hours of liesure time. If my SO was not involved with the show, and we were surveying the entertainment listings together, I’m confident that ‘Biloxi Blues’ would not have made the cut. But my SO was excited about this show, and that’s the criteria I use to accept or decline the invitation.
I could have skipped it. I’m glad I didn’t. I’m not mad that you skipped it, but rather, sad that you did. It was your loss. In a market where the critical question “How high is the bar set?” is accurately answered with “What bar?”, you passed on a show that would have easily cleared the bar set in more sophisticated, better supported markets.
Here’s what you missed: brilliant, spot-on casting, focused direction, energetic presence from every cast member, unselfish ensemble work, precision design, and clever staging of a play rife with devices dear to Mercury’s contributors – vitriolic profanity, bodily function jokes, young men in tank tops and skivvies, hookers, sexuality (hetero- and homo-) – in an exploration of personal and social issues that matter to Mercury’s readers: loneliness, individual expression in the face of enforced conformity, injustice… and prejudice.
I like Neil Simon. And I like Alison, too.