Excerpted from The Blade, Toledo, Ohio, Section D, Page 6, Sept. 14, 2000
Village Players lead off with a hit
September 14, 2000
BY NANCIANN CHERRY
BLADE PEACH SECTION EDITOR
When an excellent cast is handed beautifully crafted dialogue, it makes for a wonderful evening of theater. With Neil Simon's Laughter on the 23rd Floor, the Village Players has opened its 44th season with a winner.
Simon, author of such works as Barefoot in the Park, Sweet Charity, Biloxi Blues, and The Odd Couple, honed his talents in early television, writing for The Phil Silvers Show and Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows. With Laughter on the 23rd Floor, Simon goes back to those roots, setting his story in the writers' room of The Max Prince Show, a 90-minute weekly variety show on NBC in 1953.
The narrator, Lucas Brickman (played by Perrysburg High School senior Cory Trares), is a thinly veiled version of Simon, the new kid who is getting his chance to work on the best comedy show on TV. Lucas is in awe of Prince (Rob Gentry), of whom he says, "Max was unlike any comedian I had ever seen before. He didn't tell jokes. He didn't say funny lines. He was just funny." He is also in awe of the quality of writing. And he is bemused by the characters who came up with show's hilarity and shenanigans week after week. "Lunatics," he calls them at one point, when he realizes that if he wants to stay, he'll have to become a lunatic, too.
His co-workers include head writer Val Skolsky (Joel Ungerleider), a Russian emigrant whose heavy accent is a target for the caustic humor of Milt Fields (Don Weber), who cheerfully admits that he's never serious about anything. Then there are the chain-smoking Brian Doyle (Tom Kleinert), whose plans to go to Hollywood are a source of amusement to the rest in the room; the brilliant, sophisticated Kenny Franks (Rich Harrison); Ira Stone (Tom Hofbauer), a fidgeting hypochondriac who actively dislikes Brian, and Carol Wyman (Sybil Small), who demands to be taken seriously by her peers. "I don't want to be called a woman writer," she insists. "I want to be called a good writer."
The dynamics among this group of co-workers, along with Max and the secretary, Helen (Kate Argow), provide the humor and the poignancy of Laughter on the 23rd Floor. For the most part, these are intelligent people who are good at what they do, who produce a quality product that entertains the public every week. They may not always like each other, but they work as a team, a family. They encourage, fight, tease, and worry about each other, and they are all intensely loyal to Max, who treats them with respect and pays them what they deserve.
But times are changing. Sophisticated humor and skits about Joseph McCarthy don't bring in the audience the way that Leave It to Beaver and Beat the Clock do, so NBC wants to cut Max's revue to one hour. And that's only the beginning of the demands.
Simon imbues nearly every line of his play with wit and biting satire about the human comedy and the decline of television, and director Pat Kennedy's cast is more than equal to the demand of delivery and perfect comedic timing. Lucas, perhaps, is the weakest member of the team, but that is due much more to Simon's keeping his alter ego a relatively straight man than it is to Trares' work.
As Ira and Brian, Hofbauer and Kleinert have a particular chemistry, and the scene in which they go head to head in a humor contest is worth the price of admission. It's not surprising that they work so well together, for both are members of the Around the Bend Players, a local stand-up comedy troupe.
As much as it is about comedy, Laughter on the 23rd Floor is about people, which is what gives it heart and keeps it on track when the humor becomes nasty and the future looks grim. Unlike Simon's The Sunshine Boys, where the main characters are so bitter and self-centered that it's tough to like them, Laughter's inhabitants are all sympathetic, even when their all-too-human flaws are exposed.
Laughter on the 23rd Floor is worth seeing as much for the pleasure of watching fine local talent as it is for enjoying Neil Simon's sterling writing.
One more thing. The language in Laughter gets very raw; if plays were rated as movies are, it would deserve an R. However, it is quite in keeping with the setting, the topic, and the characters.
Last Modified: 02/25/06