Those who like Neil Simon like the humor in his plays. Those who adore him also adore the pain in his plays. This production's adoring director, Jerry Beal, lets the laughs ease from the all-too-human interactions while nurturing the agony the characters have borne for all too long.
Not much is funnier than an aged comic, except perhaps a grumpy aged comic. Add a second, slightly oblivious aged comic, and we have Simon's homage to his vaudevillian predecessors. No longer boys and certainly no longer of sunshiny dispositions, Willie (Milt Kogan) and Al (Roy Stuart) haven't seen each other in 11 years and haven't spoken to each other in 12, despite their decades-long history as a performing duo. Simon introduces us to them as they are brought together by Willie's nephew (Ed F. Martin) for one last performance. To flesh his characters the playwright adds non-comic layers: Willie and Al fear rejection, loneliness, failure, so they live in denial.
Kogan's stoop-shouldered, slovenly character clutches his bitterness as if it were a prized possession. Stuart's Al appears as a dapper, butter-wouldn't-melt gentleman, but his befuddlement makes intelligent communication with him nearly impossible. As the incendiary situation begins to ignite, Kogan is the first to flame, leaping about in his character's rage. Stuart can't help but catch fire, but he takes it in a slow burn that frustrates Willie.
Willie and Al's former skit, opening Act Two here, is a marvel of writing - thanks in huge part to the comics on whose shoulders Simon admittedly stands. We can see why the "boys"' routine could have run 43 years under the expertise of of these precision machines. Amy Tolsky is cast as both of the play's nurses - skit and real-life - so she makes the former blonde and perky and the latter disheveled and hardened, using different, albeit highly comedic, energy in each. And in the most thankless of the roles - as Ben, the agent/nephew - Martin is consistently fresh, tender toward Ben's uncle, and totally interested in the characters onstage with him.
Beal knows when to pause before a laugh line and when to pounce on it. When Willie takes a turn for the nurse, it's less salacious and more wistful, but when his obstinacy sets in, it's instantaneous. That some of the staging looks vaudevillian is probably Beal's tribute to his own predecessors. He has struck a fine balance between comedy and pain, and Simon probably would be proud. And laughing.
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